Big win for Blade Runner.

Byline: The Register-Guard

When South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius learned last week that he would be allowed to compete for a spot in the Beijing Olympics, he told The Associated Press that he had "been struggling to hide my smile for the last half an hour."

Disabled athletes around the world are smiling right along with Pistorius today - as is anyone who has succeeded in overcoming seemingly impossible odds.

However difficult it may have been for the elated Pistorius to hide his smile, it would have been far easier than trying to hide the reason his Olympic dream had become so controversial. Pistorius, who calls himself "the fastest man on no legs," was born without fibulas - the long outer bone between the knee and ankle. Both his legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old.

But when Pistorius straps on his J-shaped, carbon-fiber, Cheetah Flex-Foot prostheses, he can cover 100 meters in 10.91 seconds and 400 meters in 46.56 seconds. Those are world record times for a disabled sprinter, and Pistorius has set Para-lympic records in the 100, 200 and 400 meters.

Which was fine and dandy with everyone, as long as the track star nicknamed the "Blade Runner" continued to compete with other disabled athletes in events that permitted the use of adaptive prosthetic devices. But when Pistorius finished second last summer in the 400 at the South African Championships - an able-bodied meet - he became a potential candidate for the country's Olympic 4x400-meter relay team. That prompted questions about whether his thin, flat-black Cheetahs gave him an unfair mechanical advantage. The questions arose because of the unorthodox way Pistorius runs.

Unlike able-bodied sprinters who blast out of the starting blocks in a crouch, Pistorius must stand almost straight up at the start because he needs to use his hips to generate most of his initial power. He takes off so slowly that he's usually dead last during the first part of a race.

As he gets into a running rhythm on the spring-like Cheetahs, he actually keeps accelerating and often overtakes racers who were far ahead of him. Track officials worried that the carbon fiber blades were returning energy more efficiently than a normal human ankle joint.

The International Association of Athletics Federation assigned a biomechanics expert to examine Pistorius' Cheetahs. He concluded that the prosthetics enabled Pistorius to expend less energy than other sprinters and therefore were unfair. The IAAF barred Pistorius from its events, including the Olympics.

Undaunted, Pistorius assembled his own experts and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international panel that has final say over legal matters in sport. The court was persuaded that the Cheetahs did not give Pistorius an unfair advantage and ruled that he was eligible to compete in the Olympics.

The ruling doesn't settle the issue, but it's an important start. As more and more young soldiers return from Iraq with missing limbs, intense research is being done on improving the performance of prosthetics. These amputees surely will swell the ranks of disabled athletes, and they'll be happy to know it isn't cheating to use Cheetahs.

In the meantime, we'll keep cheering for Pistorius and urging sports rule makers to err on the side of inclusion in their decisions about who is eligible to compete.