Talking of prosthetic limbs (below), here's Matthew Syed in the Times (£), arguing that Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner, should be allowed to compete in athletics events like the World Championships and the Olympics:
[W]e have a criterion for distinguishing between “good” and “bad” discrimination in the real world. Discriminating against an innumerate candidate for a maths professorship is good and fair. That is the kind of discrimination I love. Discriminating against a black person for a maths professorship, on the other hand, is bad and unfair. We look to the higher purpose (teaching maths effectively), which the Ancient Greeks called telos, to provide us with an operable concept of fairness.
Bu there is no telos in sport, no purpose beyond entertainment. That is why we have no way of adjudicating fairness. In boxing, the world flyweight champion makes more money than a heavyweight novice, even though he would stand no chance of beating him. Is this fair, or desperately unfair? There is no sensible answer, beyond that provided by the free market.
Which brings us back to Pistorius. Is it fair that he should run on blades? It is like asking whether it is fair for horses to carry weights in a handicap. All sporting rules are arbitrary. If you don’t like the decision of the International Association of Athletics Federations to allow him to compete, create a new version of athletics where amputees on blades are excluded. That is your right. And you can ask spectators which they would prefer to watch. But please don’t ask a court to adjudicate.
Sport must have rules, and they must discriminate between winners and losers. That is the meaning of sport. But the rules themselves are neither fair nor unfair. They are arbitrary.
This is - ahem - nonsense on stilts. The reason we have flyweight boxers is to allow smaller fighters to have a go. It's arbitrary in the sense that any division into varying abilities is arbitrary, but it's not totally arbitrary. It makes sense, just as it makes sense to have a system of promotion within the various football leagues so that we don't see Manchester United playing against a team of schoolboys (and we'll ignore the sniggering at the back there, thank you).
A more apt boxing comparison would be a fighter with artificial arms. Would that be allowed? With current technology it'd be viciously, comically one-sided, but it's easy to imagine fancy artificial arms being developed soon capable of some serious power. Or just the hands: unscrew your usual delicate everyday hands and screw in those solid chrome-plated fists of fury. Either way it's immediately obvious that it's a non-starter. The whole point is that, within the weight category, both fighters should be equally equipped with a full set of original 100% human limbs, or it isn't fair. And, contra Syed, sport is crucially dependent on that notion of fairness. Otherwise it's just a fairground attraction: the Great Blondino vs. Magneto the Metal Man.
What if Pistorius swapped his current blades for new ones made from the latest carbon-fibre titaniumised kryptonite, and he could cut three seconds off his time? It's entirely plausible (well, apart from the kryptonite bit). He'd come in five yards ahead of the opposition. Would that be OK? And if not - for those who think he should be allowed to compete in all and every athletics competition - why not?
There are two factors here, I think, which explain why so many otherwise sensible people support this strange idea of allowing Pistorius to compete on equal terms. The first is that we get carried away by all the feel-good stuff. There's the inevitable "what-an-inspiration-the-man-is", overcoming handicaps and all that. And we're all primed to respond to that idea of discrimination: note Matthew Syed's careful inclusion of the case of a black person being refused a professorship, to prime the right anti-discrimination responses and make us feel good about ourselves and our wonderful inclusivity.
The other factor is that Pistorius is coming in at about the right time to make it appear that his blades are just a straight swap for knees, calves, ankles and feet. He managed to make the semi-final in the World Championships, but not the final. At a less advanced stage of artificial limb construction he wouldn't have stood a chance. In a few years time....well, it's at least plausible that double amputees like him will be steaming far ahead of their able-bodied rivals. So we think, yes, if he hadn't had the misfortune to lose his legs, that's about the kind of times he'd be putting in anyway, so it's petty really to make such a fuss about it. Disabilities should be invisible to the modern sensitive and well-brought-up person. We pretend we don't notice them, and here, with Pistorius - look! - they really don't make a difference.
But they do. The arbitrariness is not in the nature of sport, but in the fact that the technology of Pistorius's blades are, for the moment, allowing the illusion that we have some kind of level playing field and can pretend that it makes no difference whether your lower legs are real or artificial. But of course it makes a difference. Good luck to the man, but I don't think for a moment he should be competing in next year's Olympics.
Comments