Abstract
Objections to the use of assistive technologies (such as prostheses) in elite sports are generally raised when the technology in question is perceived to afford the user a potentially “unfair advantage,” when it is perceived as a threat to the purity of the sport, and/or when it is perceived as a precursor to a slippery slope toward undesirable changes in the sport. These objections rely on being able to quantify standards of “normal” within a sport so that changes attributed to the use of assistive technology can be judged as causing a significant deviation from some baseline standard. This holds athletes using assistive technologies accountable to standards that restrict their opportunities to achieve greatness, while athletes who do not use assistive technologies are able to push beyond the boundaries of these standards without moral scrutiny. This paper explores how constructions of fairness and “normality” impact athletes who use assistive technology to compete in a sporting venue traditionally populated with “able-bodied” competitors. It argues that the dynamic and obfuscated construction of “normal” standards in elite sports should move away from using body performance as the measuring stick of “normal,” toward alternate forms of constructing norms such as defining, quantifying, and regulating the mechanical actions that constitute the critical components of a sport. Though framed within the context of elite sports, this paper can be interpreted more broadly to consider problems with defining “normal” bodies in a society in which technologies are constantly changing our abilities and expectations of what normal means.
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Notes
I use the term “need” here, but it is should be noted that not all athletes with limb absence use a prosthetic limb(s) to compete in organized sports. For example Anthony Robles won the 2010–2011 NCAA individual wrestling championship with a left leg absence, but never used a prosthetic leg to compete. Ironically, critics complained that Robles’ limb absence gave him an unfair advantage over other wrestlers (Merrill 2013).
In some cases “able-bodied” athletes (as well as athletes using AT) do experience moral scrutiny when they employ the use of certain drugs or supplements that may or may not afford an unfair advantage. The differences and similarities to AT use are discussed in the context of performance enhancing drugs in the section “An Unfair Advantage.”
Technical aids are defined in Rule 144.2(e) of the IAAF competition rules “as technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides the user with an advantage over valid athletes” (International Association of Athletics Federation 2008).
After Pistorius’s successful appeal, he was unable to make the qualifying time required for entry into the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, but was able to compete in the 2012 London summer Olympics.
CAS also noted that the lead scientist, Prof. Peter Bruggemann, had not been given access to all the information IAAF had regarding the case, and that the IAAF had put certain restriction on Prof. Bruggemann that prevented him from evaluating all aspects of Pistorius’s athletic performance, such as Pistorius’s slower performance when sprinting around curves.
Unless perhaps these physical characteristics are achieved through the use of banned PED’s, but even then, records set by able-bodied athletes who have used illegal PED’s to change the physical characteristics of their body to facilitate a significant advantage, though criticized, are not always refuted after the fact. This was the case for numerous German swimmers in the 1976 Summer Olympics when it was revealed 15 years later that the swimmers had been using illegal PED at the time; the International Olympic Committee ruled that the medals would not be stripped and the records would not be removed (Clarey 1998).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nick Schweitzer, Joe Herkert, Jay Klein, and Troy McDaniel (Arizona State University) for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. No funding was used to complete this research. Portions of this paper were presented at the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Technology, May 2014.
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Baker, D.A. The “Second Place” Problem: Assistive Technology in Sports and (Re) Constructing Normal. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 93–110 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9629-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9629-1