As prosthetics become normalized, the cyborg olympics?

image taken from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/tags/cheetah+blades/

On the 16^th of May, 2008, the Court for Arbitration of Sport, an international body overseeing fairness in athletics, effectively granted a runner with two mechanical feet the right to compete in the Olympics, should he qualify. In the past this has never been much of an issue, but it looks like it increasingly will be. At what point do the mechanisms designed to compensate for an athlete’s disadvantages start to actually give them an advantage over regular athletes? Up until now, no one with mechanical feet - in this case consisting of two bent, spring-like carbon-fibre blades – had ever been able to compete on par with regular track athletes. Suddenly it is no longer a disadvantage to depend on prosthetics; it’s possible that it might even be an advantage. In such an environment, sport has the potential to become less about the capacity of the physical body to perform tasks, as much as it is about engineering. Maybe it won’t happen at the regular Olympics - the committee is still pretty concerned about what they deem to be ‘unfair advantages’ - but maybe at the Paralympics soon: the winner will be the cyborg with the best parts[1].

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[1] New York Times, May 17^th, 2008