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Article & Video Discussion / Re: Short vid on how Oscar Pistorius prosthetics work.
« on: August 06, 2012, 02:45:30 pm »I was wondering when you'd show up with that article. Same one you had posted before. What I'm wondering is why he's still running if the evidence is so conclusive as they say. USATF and IAAF are organizations that disqualify people from running over too much caffeine. It's not something they take lightly. If they really do give him that big of an advantage, and it's been shown in research, why are they still letting him run?
hell if i know why they are, but there was pretty obviously a political decision to ignore the main thrust of weyand's and bundle's findings. maybe they figured he'd be good for the sport financially.
Quote from: Science of Sport
There is the argument that the CAS-proceeding determined a very narrow approach to the scientific question, which had really only one goal - to disprove the IAAF's findings. In other words, the CAS process was not interested in the entire truth, but only in evaluating the evidence gathered by the IAAF. And there's no question that the IAAF started off with a very narrow research question.
By extension, Pistorius' scientific team were interested only in the "truth" that would, among other things, eventually see them add distance runners to the control group until Pistorius looked similar to able-bodied athletes. Effectively, the previous research had "set the bar" and they jumped over it, using the methods I explained yesterday. A narrow finding got even narrower, and the whole truth did not emerge when it could have. In all this, there was reason to suggest an advantage but the scientists did not make it known at the time, even if it was only for the purposes of debate.
Taking this into account, and adding in the fact that the research to clear Pistorius had very obvious omissions and false comparisons with distance runners when they knew what the sprinter-comparison would have revealed, you start to see that things really were not what they appeared to be with this "independent scientific process". You may make up your own minds about what it means when scientists selectively leave out able-bodied sprinters and compare a sprinter to distance runners? Or what it means when scientists recognize the possible advantage but fail to mention it at a hearing on advantages? It strikes me as strange at best, manipulative bordering on dishonest at worst.
right-o.
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When the time comes that he's actually a concern for a medal or even finals, then I'll be worried about it. So far he isn't really affecting anything with his times, so I don't see why it should be such a big concern.
are you serious? he's doing something fundamentally different from what able-bodied runners are doing. seems a bit ridiculous to say that he should be allowed to compete until he gets faster at the thing he's doing than they are at what they're doing. you could race a motorcycle against a boat, but if the motorcycle won you wouldn't call it the faster of two boats.
