Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius will be first amputee to compete in the world championships

Oscar Pistorius of South Africa just qualified for the 400-meter and the 4x400-meter relay races at this year's World Championships, his first trip there. That's an amazing feat in itself, but made more amazing as Pistorius is a double amputee, using two carbon-fiber Cheetah prosthetic legs to run. He'll be the first-ever amputee athlete to perform at the event, BBC reported.

Pistorius, at 24 years old, has had his share of difficulties in competing with able-bodied athletes. His prosthetics were at one time declared to represent an unfair advantage over the athletes using the flesh-and-blood legs they were born with, rather than the space-age sproing-y Cheetah legs Pistorus uses, though he was eventually cleared for Olympic competition.

Pistorius isn't a favorite at the World Championships--his qualifying time, a personal-best 45.07 seconds, was just barely fast enough to earn him a ticket to the games in Daegu, South Korea--but he calls it "the highest-profile and most prestigious able-bodied event which I have ever competed in."

We've previously called for a league of exclusively performance-enhanced athletes, but it sounds like Pistorius is thrilled just to compete with the best able-bodied sprinters in the world.


/Popular Science/