By Toby Davis
LONDON, Sept 3 (Reuters) – Oscar Pistorius was not beaten
because his opponent’s blades were longer, a professor of sports
engineering told Reuters on Monday.
The South African, dubbed the “Blade Runner”, was upset by
Brazil’s Alan Oliveira in the final of the Paralympic men’s 200
metres and prompted controversy when he used a post-race
interview to question the legitimacy of his defeat.
Pistorius suggested that his opponent’s prosthetics had
artificially lengthened his stride, giving him an unfair
advantage.
According to professor Steve Haake of Sheffield Hallam
University, however, stride length and the size of his
prosthetics were not the deciding factors in the result.
“The practical outcome of larger blades is a greater stride
length, assuming you turn over your legs at the same rate,”
professor Haake told Reuters in a telephone interview. “But to
do that, the mass of the legs needs to be smaller. It is called
the conservation of angular momentum.
“Imagine the experiment when you spin someone round on an
office chair with their arms outstretched. If they bring their
arms in, they speed up. It is the same effect with athletes’
prosthetics. When the mass is closer to the centre they are
easier to spin.
“Just making the legs longer, therefore, doesn’t necessarily
make Oliveira quicker … In any case, if you look at Oliveira,
he actually took more strides, which means a shorter stride
length. It was that that won him the race.”
Professor Haake also questioned whether Pistorius, who runs
against able-bodied athletes and competed in last month’s
Olympics, had damaged his argument that his prosthetics do not
give him an advantage.
Continued…
