Swimming has 10 classifications for athletes with different physical impairments, plus three more for visual impairments and one for athletes with intellectual deficits. For that reason it is particularly prone to challenges, and swimmers say they sometimes suspect that athletes have not been classified correctly.
Three weeks before she was set to compete in the London Paralympics, Mallory Weggemann, an American swimmer who is paralyzed from the waist down, learned that officials from the International Paralympic Committee had questions about her level of ability and were requiring her to submit to reclassification in London.
And this:
The most notorious example of Paralympic classification manipulation took place at the 2000 Games in Sydney. The Spanish men’s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members were not intellectually disabled at all.
After that, mentally disabled athletes were barred from the Paralympics while officials revised the classification process; they are back again this year.
The athletes say they sympathize with the difficulties faced by the classifiers, who are forced to determine how to sort people who have several hundred different types and degrees of disability.
There is more here, interesting throughout and yet also more interesting than the article itself as well.
After watching all the Olympics weirdness (e.g., Carmelita Jeter), I got to wondering which sports have the _least_ cheating and advantage-taking?
I’d have to say that among major sports, golf has the most morally healthy culture: you still see pros call penalties on themselves that nobody else can even see.
Still, it seems likely that Tiger was pushing the envelope pretty hard when he suddenly got so massive around 2006-2007. Still, if he was juicing, it wasn’t just to cheat at golf. The weird thing is that he was apparently thinking at the time of giving up golf to enlist in the Navy SEALs, which is why he was pumping so much iron.
If you count golf then snooker also has a very healthy culture.
Good for snooker. I wasn’t aware that the top snooker player takes in $40 million to $60 million per year.
Monetary reward does not a sport make.
I would say that Steve should know better than to assume that monetary reward determines sport status, but I already read several essays he’s written about IQ, so I figure he doesn’t know better.
economist1 says:
“Monetary reward does not a sport make.”
Spoken like a true economist!
Weirdness?
“Weirdness?”
Besides obvious stuff like Caster Semenya, it’s funny how many TV viewers don’t notice that many celebrated athletes look a little implausible, such as that Serena Williams looks more ripped than Roger Federer.
But, heck, Tiger Woods went from wiry to massive around the age of 30 and barely anybody mentioned this physical change in the world’s most famous athlete. Remember back in 1998 when Stephen Jay Gould was celebrating Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for returning the “innocence” to baseball? Remember how Bill James studiously avoided the topic of performance enhancing drugs for 20 years?
@Steve:
Out of 6 sportsmen you ridicule, 5 non-whites: Carmelita Jeter, Tiger Woods, Caster Semenya, Serena Williams, Sammy Sosa
Is that statistically obvious or just one of those freak anomalies or is that your subtle insinuation now that colored sportsmen abuse drugs more often?
Glad you added Mark McGwire to the list. Gives you some semblance of impartiality.
You may not be aware that Steve Sailer is a big, big, giant racist. He thinks black people in particular are inferior to me (I would say you or me, but I can’t see you). He does not particularly care about your “impartiality”, as his belief as to “impartiality” is that we should all acknowledge the inferiority of black people. Of course, racism, biological determinism and the justification of libertarianism were three very intertwined topics in the last century, so maybe that explains his interest here, and also perhaps in TC’s interest in the Roissy fad, and in the connections to the Robin Hanson theories about fems.
Steven Jay Gould and Bill James are black?
Look, spectator sports have a huge PED problem, and spectator sports in America are disproportionately black dominated, as you can see from, say, watching ESPN Sportscenter. So it’s hardly surprising that a lot of athletes in the news this summer who have testosterone questions about them are black.
I’ve long pointed out that much of the blame should fall on white thought leaders, sports executives, and media executives. Bill James is a particularly shameful example. Michael Lewis is another for his wide-eyed Moneyball book about the franchise, Oakland, with the most flagrant history of PED abuse in the history of baseball, going back to Jose Canseco (who is white, if that’s important to you in thinking about this).
But Millian, why were those topics intertwined? Given the little bit I know about the economic underpinnings of libertarianism, I was surprised to see the racist/nativist/misogynist undertows here. I would have thought an ideology exalting personal liberty would be super inclusive (albeit with a sink-or-swim discipline). People have a right to their own opinions and politics evolve in odd ways, but the combinations here do sometimes puzzle me.
“Is that statistically obvious or just one of those freak anomalies or is that your subtle insinuation now that colored sportsmen abuse drugs more often?”
Or perhaps it’s because “colored” sportsmen have a higher degree of success and prominence in sports. Woods and Williams have been the most famous golfer and women’s tennis player of the past decade, respectively. And Sosa was one-half of the notorious McGwire/Sosa duo of the early 2000s. Woods has gotten very jacked over the course of his career, Williams is freakishly muscular for a woman, and Sosa has actually tested positive–so raising an eyebrow hardly seems unwarranted here.
It’s a testament to the success of “colored” athletes they’re even worth having a discussion over. We’re not going to talk about the myriad of white minor league baseball players who roid.
Poorly thought-out racism witchhunt, Rahul.
‘Remember back in 1998 when Stephen Jay Gould was celebrating Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for returning the “innocence” to baseball?” I think you probably follow SJG more closely than 99.9999% of the rest of the world….
I’m kind of surprised that the NFL can escape scrutiny for juicing compared to sports like baseball or cycling. It doesn’t seem natural for the number of massive 300 pound linemen in NFL to increase from 1 in 1970 to 394 today : http://articles.philly.com/2010-08-31/news/24974673_1_rosters-weights-college-football-players
Why isn’t there a category for heavy smokers; for fat, old geezers; for pregnant women; for alcoholics …..?
Wait a minute. The Paralympics have equestrian teams made up of handicapped riders? What about the horses? Aren’t they handicapped as well? Shouldn’t the horses be missing legs or wheezing or having equine afflictions like glanders or founder? Just doesn’t seem right that perfectly healthy horses should be competing in the Paralympics.
In the politics of the current presidential election cycle, “disability” is believing that the election is for the president of Kolob (a planet of Mormons – Seriously!).
Any word if some of those illicit basketball players were from Harvard?
But will Pistorius run?
If so, can all the other runners claim disabilities for blisters, stress fractures, cleat lacerations, shinsplints, roadrash, ingrown toenails, sprains, pulled hamstrings, achillies heel and tendonitis?
As I discussed with my wife, what we need to do is take the top 30 runners and cut their legs off and replace with leaf springs and see if there is a statistically significant effect.
Even if there were, it would take a long time to be noticeable. I’m sure there is a steep learning curve–Pistorius has been running on prosthetics a long time. That is to say, this debate will go on for a long time.
I this Pistorius won’t be the last runner to use those protheses. I figure that someone in the Carribean will eventually become a major runner while also missing parts of their legs. The technology for these protheses is fairly recent, so I agree- this debate will go on for a long time.
Till I see a runner undergo a voluntary amputation it’s hard to take the whiney unfairness calls seriously.
I can’t understand why Pistorius can’t get legs that are intended to be identical to standard human legs. The controversy over his competition can’t be worth the small advantage he gets from the protheses.
Rahul- how’s this for whining: “Having won his own legal battle to compete wearing carbon-fiber blades alongside able-bodied rivals, Pistorius suggested that Oliveira ran with longer prosthetics than should be allowed.”
http://espn.go.com/olympics/story/_/id/8332031/oscar-pistorius-stunned-200-final-paralympics
As long as we’re drawing lines, I’m guessing most folks in these parts aren’t professional athletes.
Caffeine? Adderall? The coming Kurzweilian world? Where do we stand on performance-enhancement overall?
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