Cheer for Blade Runner.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Here's something that will get Track City fans stoked for the Olympic Trials in Eugene next June: South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius has been cleared to compete internationally, and he's determined to qualify for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

What's so special about that? If you could just watch him run, you wouldn't need to ask.

He's easy to spot when he bounds out of the starting blocks. The 20-year-old always takes off so slowly, it seems he'll never catch the leaders. But once he reaches full stride, no one in the world runs faster.

No one, that is, who's had both legs amputated below the knee and is running on J-shaped carbon fiber Cheetah Flex-Foot prostheses.

Now the track star nicknamed "Blade Runner" has become a lightning rod in the stormy debate over whether his springy prosthetic "feet" give him an unfair mechanical advantage. Fortunately, international track officials have ruled that Pistorius can compete against able-bodied runners while researchers try to determine what role - if any - the Cheetahs play in his world-class sprint times.

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 he straps on the thin, flat-black Cheetahs - they look a bit like oddly bent cross-country skis - 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, but Pistorius is looking beyond the Paralympics for his next challenge.

He just finished second in the 400 at the South African Championships - an able-bodied meet - and he's aiming to run an Olympic-qualifying 46.3 in the 400 before the July 2008 deadline. His second-place finish in the South African Championships would make him a candidate for the country's Olympic 4X400-meter relay team if South Africa were to qualify as one of the world's 16 fastest teams.

The debate over whether a disabled athlete's prosthetic or adaptive device creates an unfair advantage is not new. In some cases, the advantage is clear. Wheelchair racer Masazumi Soejima finished first in this year's Boston Marathon, 44 minutes and 57 seconds before Robert Cheruiyot crossed the finish line first on foot.

But much less is known about the contribution a prosthesis such as the Cheetah makes to the performance a disabled runner. Unlike able-bodied sprinters, Pistorius has no calf muscles or ankles providing energy and spring in his strides. Studies of amputee runners who use prosthetics have shown a lower energy return per stride than the natural legs of an able-bodied runner.

Right now, it looks like Pistorius is simply one fast dude who happens to have the weirdest running shoes on the track. More data is definitely needed, but international track officials made the right call to allow Pistorius to compete while the research is being done.

If he qualifies for the 2008 Olympics, Pistorius won't be the first Paralympian or amputee to make the jump to the Olympics. Eugene's Marla Runyon, legally blind from degenerative Stargardt's disease, moved from the pentathlon at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics to running the Olympic 1,500 and 5,000 meters in Sydney and Athens. And in one of Olympic history's most memorable athletic performances, American gymnast George Eyser won six medals, three of them gold, with a wooden left leg at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis.

International track sanctioning organizations have not expressly barred athletes who use prosthetics from competing, but the spotlight on Pistorius is certain to prompt calls for clear rulings. The time is right to tackle the issue.

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 will surely swell the ranks of disabled athletes, and they'll need to know whether it's cheating to use Cheetahs.

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