Paralympics: Competitors pushing boundaries

By GREG ANSLEY

SYDNEY - The Paralympics are set to rocket disabled athletes further up a steep performance curve that will push limits closer to those of able-bodied sports.

In some - wheelchair racing and powerlifting, for example - they are already faster and, on power-to-weight ratios, stronger.

And there is a long way to go before the law of diminishing returns slams the brakes on performance breakthroughs, says New Zealand Paralympics team medical director Dr Dale Speedy.

But the key role played by technology is also causing concern, with fears that the cost of state-of-the-art equipment will keep athletes from poorer nations out of the medal haul.

Athletes at the Sydney Paralympics will be racing aerodynamically designed wheelchairs made of carbon fibre and composite materials that can cost up to $10,000.

Even the racing tyres can cost $100 each.

And with chairs - or should that be chariots? - that weigh as little as 7kg, speeds of over 60 km/h are not unusual.

That would explain the three layers of gloves the athletes wear to prevent blisters.

The runners will be competing against amputees using a Flex Foot, a curved, carbon-fibre, prosthetic limb that acts like a spring to reduce energy needed by 15 per cent and increase speed.

Professor Tim Bach, of the Centre for Prosthetics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, told a scientific congress held in conjunction with the Paralympics that the device could decide victory.

But he said that at $4000 or more, the limb was probably beyond the reach of most Third World athletes.

Records set by athletes with a disability are being matched and beaten at an accelerating pace, narrowing the gap with able-bodied sports whose gains have become incremental as bodies and science reach their limits.

Dr Speedy believes disabled sports are only just starting their big leap forward. The knowledge gained from the vast amounts of research into able-bodied sports is now starting to flow into disability sports, spreading out to coaches and athletes.

Technology - including new design principles, bioengineering and plastics and other materials - is pushing the limits.

And research is increasing into the effects of disability on performance.

The type of disability does have its own impact on an athlete's performance, Dr Speedy says.

Athletes with spinal cord damage, for example, have problems with blood volume and how much blood the heart pumps out.

A lot of research has been done looking at such limitations.

Athletes are already extending the boundaries.

Paraplegic New Zealand archer Neroli Fairhall, a 1982 Commonwealth Games gold medallist, was this year third overall and second in the shoot-off in the able-bodied national championships.

Hamilton powerlifter Tracey Wright is bench-pressing about 100kg, one of only a handful of women in the country - able-bodied or with a disability - to reach that level.

Ben Lucas, the New Zealand team leader in Sydney and a world-class marathon wheelchair racer, says times in his sport have already eclipsed those reached by able-bodied runners.

The wheelchair world record is 1h 20m against the runners' time of 2h 5s.

Times continue to be pruned.

The world wheelchair racing record for 1500m has been slashed from 3m 13s at Barcelona in 1992 to 2m 56s, and for 10,000m from 22m to 20m 25s.

Australian sports scientist Professor Greg Gass told the Paralympics scientific congress that the part played by technology needed to be re-examined because of the advantage it gave to athletes from wealthier countries.

Lucas says this has always been an issue for athletes with a disability.

"Because we have to adapt to our disabilities it's not just a matter of a tennis racquet, for example - you also have to have a tennis chair.

"For wheelchair rugby, you have to have a specialist rugby wheelchair and for racing you have to have a specialist racing chair, and so on.

"Each one of these pieces of equipment, if you're competing, is going to cost $5000 to $10,000 and that's something we've always had to deal with."

Equipment, Lucas says, does make a difference.

The revolution in wheelchair technology that followed the 1988 Seoul Paralympics changed the face of disabled sports.

Races for the following five or six years were decided by the athlete with the latest chair.

But Lucas says that, with the spread of technology and design rules, the playing field is being levelled.

The evolution over the past 10 years of the racing chair is such that the designs now are not really that much different from each other, he says.

And Dr Speedy warns that any attempt to block further advances in wheelchair or prosthetic technology would harm all people with disabilities.

Improvements made in sports technology, he says, filter down to equipment for everyday use.

Click here for Herald Online Olympic/Paralympic News