Track should welcome amputee
Weather reports in San Francisco on Tuesday predicted highs of 64 and partly cloudy. What they didn’t say was that most of those clouds were hovering directly above a federal courthouse, where the dying sport that is track and field continued to drown under a torrent of doping scandals.
Meanwhile, Oscar Pistorius tries to qualify for the Olympics while running on a pair of technologically superior prosthetic legs.
They call him The Blade Runner, and any advantage the double-amputee from South Africa has over able-bodied runners should be tabled for more widespread research.
Or at least until the words track and field aren’t immediately followed by "federal prison term."
Track needs Pistorius today. Even if he was wired like the Six Million Dollar Man, the sport should still welcome and celebrate his pursuit.
This is the extent to which its integrity has sunk, so low that NBC will show more prime-time coverage of beach volleyball from the Beijing Games than any sprints, hurdles or long jumps.
This is how bad things are now for track and field, whose credibility continues its dramatic decline this week as the case of Trevor Graham, once the planet’s best sprint coach, is under way in the Bay Area on charges he lied to federal officials in the BALCO investigation.
Things could get even uglier (yes, it’s possible) if one of the government’s star witnesses, who already said he supplied banned substances to athletes who won a total of 26 Olympic medals, continues to name names. The whole thing is a mess of cheating and lies, of deception seeping through syringes.
Meanwhile, Pistorius flies around tracks on legs made of carbon fiber while others debate the percentage of energy he uses to lift his feet compared to able-bodied sprinters.
He has an edge. There is a difference between springing off a Cheetah Flex-foot and a human ankle, a clear athletic advantage for the 21-year-old who was born without fibulas and had both legs amputated below the knee as an infant.
In the big picture of track’s future — gloomy as it appears — the sport’s federation was correct in trying to keep him from attempting to qualify for Beijing, but it was more to protect itself against continuing technological advances in prosthetics than any fear Pistorius would be around for a medal ceremony in China.
He has yet to set a qualifying time in the 400 meters. His personal best is 46.56 seconds, and the Olympic qualifying standard is 45.55. In other words, he has to shave nearly a second in less than two months. In other words, his best chance is four years from now in London.
But in the immediacy of needing someone or something to shine the glare away from track’s steroid-injected shame, having the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturn the ban against Pistorius is the best thing to happen in some time. The next-best thing would be for South Africa to include him on its 1,600-meter relay team should it qualify one, to assure the world again hears a track story of inspiration and not indictments.
"I applaud (Pistorius)," said UNLV track coach Yvonne Scott-Williams, a two-time Olympian for Japan whose brother won a silver medal in the 100 meters at the 1996 Paralympic Games. "I suppose over time the more (disabled) athletes who try and do this, more research will show any advantage they might have. But for now, he’s one of a very few who even has a chance.
"The (state of track) is sad. I competed against a lot of the athletes who (cheated). To know you did things the right way and in a healthy manner and those ahead of you didn’t is depressing. At the same time, I love the sport and will continue to preach that there are many athletes out there doing it the right way with hard work and commitment.
"Hopefully, performances by those types of athletes and one (like Pistorius) will help lift some of those clouds away."
Marion Jones. Justin Gatlin. Tim Montgomery. Maurice Greene. Those are some pretty dark and menacing clouds to think they will soon expire from the public’s memory. Say this for doping — when it hit track and field, it led several of the sport’s greatest athletes down its corrupt and dishonest road.
Which is why track needs Oscar Pistorius and others like him. Maybe for just today. Maybe for just a second in time.
Maybe just to prove there really is some blue left in the sky hovering over a tarnished sport.
Ed Graney’s column is published Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.
PISTORIUS NOT READY TO RACE ELITE RUNNERS BERLIN — Double- amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius declined an invitation to run the 400 meters in Berlin’s ISTAF Golden League meet, saying he wasn’t ready to face the world’s elite. The South African wants to qualify for the Beijing Olympics after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled Friday that his prosthetic racing blades do not give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners. Pistorius, 21, is scheduled to compete in a regular race July 2 in Milan, Italy, with several following that. "We would be happy if he competed with us, but I think we were a little early," ISTAF spokesman Juergen Scheunemann said of the June 1 event. "But our main concern was to help and support him." Pistorius has said he might not be ready for the Beijing Games and a more realistic goal might be the 2012 London Olympics. He would have faced the likes of Olympic champion Jeremy Wariner at the Berlin meet. "Oscar doesn’t have the form yet to measure himself against the world’s best at such a big meet," Pistorius’ manager, Peet van Zyl, told Germany’s Sport Bild Online magazine. Pistorius also wants to run in the Paralympics in Beijing. He will compete in Berlin in a disabled race June 13 to 15. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
