Cyborg sports: blade runners and androgen insensitivity

1.
Remember the bread crumb idea? First attempted in Hansel and Gretel, with poor results: the birds eat the crumbs and Hansel can't get home. (Of course going home to parents who hate you and abandon you in a forest is another matter...). Later in the Extremely Early Days of computing and the net, I came across the breadcrumb notion:


A Web site navigation technique. Bread crumbs typically appear horizontally near the top of a Web page, providing links back to each previous page that the user navigates through in order to get to the current page. Basically, they provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a Web site and may look something like this:
home page --> section page --> sub section page
This technique also is referred to as a bread crumb trail.
The good news is that Angry Birds don't eat virtual breadcrumbs. 

2. 
So today I got back from errands determined to write a blog on...well, not on this topic of distraction. I was going to write about Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, which has me thinking more about cyborgs and networks, and how the new social media technologies have changed many of the behaviors and altered many of the limitations previously attached to organizing groups of people. As I sat down I realized I might want to watch the highlights of the Red Sox victory over the Yankees from last night (3-2, 10th inning walk off hit by Reddick). So I went onto ESPN's website, and promptly found a story about...Oscar Pistorius. Oscar is a double amputee running on carbon blades, and previously he had been banned by the International Association of Athletics Federations  from able-bodied competition. The IAAF argued that the blades gave him an unfair advantage; but the Court of Arbitration for Sport (you did know such a court existed, didn't you?) ruled in his favor. (Pistorius is a multiple Paralympic gold medal winner). Cyborg sports! Carbon blades! The whole question of what constituted advantage (Pistorius isn't likely to win or even make it through the heats, though his personal best time of 45.07 for the 400 meters is quite good). And most important: Pistorius, picked to represent South Africa, will compete not only in the world championships in South Korea, but also in…drum roll…the Summer Olympics in London! 


The lead article had a link to a more in-depth conversation, so of course I clicked and read Johnette Howard's story at  http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/howard-110804/oscar-pistorius-meets-olympic-qualifying-standard-400-meter-time-renews-controversy-prosthetic-legs.


And what I read was fascinating in a number of ways. Since cyborg sports is already a reality (human bodies augmented by drugs, but also by complex biomechanics measurements and training techniques, cutting edge equipment like the shark-mimicking suits for swimmers and those big-ass drivers all golfers now must have) this next phase really intrigued me. If I am an amputee, and must use these legs to run at all, should I be able to? What if those prosthetics give me an advantage; is that like taking steroids? Or does the fact that I'm an amputee balance that out? 







The answer is…we don't have an answer to whether Oscar's carbon blades (he's nicknamed Blade Runner of course) give him an advantage, unfair or not. Oscar has seven experts on a team that helped him overturn his ban. Howard comments, 


All of them provided their unpaid help to Pistorius on the condition they would independently reach their own conclusions and retain the right to publish their work when his last-resort appeal of the IAAF ruling to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) was done.


While all seven agreed the specific scientific report the IAAF used to ban Pistorius was faulty -- which was the only (and very narrow) criteria argued in his appeal before the CAS -- the same experts have since admitted they disagree on the bigger issue of whether Pistorius gets any sort of advantage from his prostheses. The different views are succinctly explained in this point/counterpoint debate that appeared in the Journal of Applied Physiology.


With the Iraq and Afghan wars producing young men and women who have lost legs, this dissuasion is likely to grow. I heard a Gulf War amputee speak at the Iron Man in Idaho a few years ago, and he says sport saved his life; he was depressed and thinking of suicide when he saw someone in carbon blades running competitively. The biomechanics are complex, but the moment when Pistorius crossed the finish line in Italy and knew he'd not only won the race but crushed his best time AND made the world championships and probably the Olympics - that's simple. It's fricking amazing. At the end of the race the second place finisher, Jamaican Lanceford Spence, "comes rushing up to Pistorius, clapping and smiling and finally embracing him in a bear hug that sends both men falling to the track."


Simple. Inspiring. Perhaps, for some out there, life saving.


And…well, the story doesn't stop there, because there was another cyborg sport story embedded in the first one.

3.


The article about Blade Runner also included a second story about Caster Semenya, the women's 800-meter world champion. She does not run on carbon legs - she has the original equipment, those amazing powerful legs that world class runners all have.




Her cyborg issue is not able/not abled, but male/female. 


Semenya has had a sensational career - she's only 19 - and she won the Berlin world championships in August 2009 with a time of 1:55.45 for the 800 meters. that was the fastest time in the world, period. She was 18. 


After her victory many, including Time Magazine, questioned her gender, and the IAFF (remember Pistorius?) required her to take a number of psychological, gynecological and endocrine tests. This meant she couldn't train for 11 months, and set off a storm of protest from South Africa's government and populace.


Unlike, say, the East German women swimmers who now appear to have taken serious amounts of performance enhancing drugs to win their Olympic gold back in the Cold War days, Semenya is thought to have what is called androgen insensitivity syndrome. According to CBS news:




People with this rare condition appear to be female, and they are, for all practical purposes. Yet in actuality, they have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome in each cell, the pattern normally found in males, according to WebMD. Some women don't find out that they have the Y chromosome until they try to conceive and end up getting the news from a doctor in a fertility clinic.


So should she have been tested? The CBS article points out that the Olympic Committee stopped testing in 1996 when 8 female athletes tested positive for the Y hormone; they stopped because it isn't clear that this gives an advantage, but also because it isn't something the person "did." 


Like Pistorius, she too has been "cleared" to run. Her version of the carbon blades is her physique, which is extraordinary, and which has set off a whole popular media frenzy in which some articles refer to her as he, and other articles try to re-dress the gender issue by dressing her up in more womanly attire. 

  


4.
Central to the cyborg debate is the question of augmented vs. restored. If an amputee has function restored, that fits more or less easily into our categories. He lost something; we are giving him that [human] thing back. Or in the case of Semenya, she did not do anything to augment her performance, and though she occupies a middle place in gender, she presents as a woman in the crucial areas. 


But as I follow the bread crumbs back, it is clear that notions of able and dis-abled, female and male, are radically in question as we head into the second decade of the 21st century. And as with Hansel and Gretel, there is likely to be no way back to the home one had (clear and obvious roles for men and women, clear differences between able bodiedness and its lack). Do we want to go back to that home? I don't. 

insult to injury

I was thinking the other day of a possible blog called "insult to injury" about aging and being in your fifties. Part of this was a cyborg reflection that aging is a software and hardware issue, and that a lot of cyborg narratives are driven by a human desire not to age as quickly as we do. 


So part of my fifties is being an athlete and beginning to get injuries based on this aging of the body, with the concomitant knowledge that my own inability to shift practices as my body changes is partly to blame for two torn muscles, a messed up knee, some emerging back issues (twice I've frozen up like some great insect with a carapace instead of a flexible spinal column). 


This would have to include the phrase fiftying it, a phrase Will Forest and I have developed. Fortying it meant you did something you used to do easily (make sharp field cuts, jumping with power, etc) and getting hurt. Fiftying it meant you did nothing noticeable and yet you STIILL GOT HURT. 


I've fiftied my ankle and my back, and I've spent four months in PT coming back from a two week span of trashing my knee (stuck on a mountainside above Desolation in Tahoe with a full pack trying to get down dead ends and free climbing pitches; drilling my knee on rebar and doing stupid Bike tricks that put too much jolt on my knees at Burning Man), and I've learned that the PT you are doing to get back function is actually the practice you ought to do anyway to retain function at this age.


And so the insult to injury is that it implies you have not, even now, learned your body very well, or well enough to avoid injury. And that a cleverer approach, a more disicplined approach, might well result not only in strength and lack of injury, but also...new/old body knowledge.


My friend Cat says that with our bodies now, everything old is new and everything new is old. She's right about that. 


And on top of all this, one has merely to look at one's desk (if one has a Memento Mori on it as the medieval philosophers did; mine is on my window ledge next to a spiral shell and a cup of pens) to see that these bodies that are no longer new also have a shelf life, a strange number which indicates the years this body will have this or that function, be able in these ways and less in those ways. Death is the whisper behind injury, is the spectre haunting the self we've cobbled together out of learning and myth, impulse and repetition, allegiance to some social norms and inevitably resistance to others.

Kelsey my neighbor said tonight in the hot tub that balance is the result of failure as well as success; each stumble is a chance to learn that balance. She is young and very immortal feeling, just out of college and on her way. She had her head back and knees up and looked very Maxfield Parrish. My brother Peter added that most adults are not really as shaped or formed as they appear; he quoted Louis CK: one of us is 5, and one of us is 8, and one of us is 37, but usually we are all down on the level of the 5 year old. 


And so we have failing and still capable and desired bodies, many of us. We think we should know more by now and we are right. The insult of lack of self knowledge is added to the injury of aging.


And yet...I sometimes think I always always knew it would be like this. Somewhere when I was 13 I was also 56. And so far 56 has felt wide open; what is old is new and what is new is old. I can sit at a computer that wasn't even a glint in Eniac's eye when I was 13 and remember 1967,  


It turns out that most of us do not learn along some nice curve. At least we don't for many of the most important challenges facing us as crazy monkeys, a species on the brink. 


I believe all the important questions have a location along the interface between body and world. And that body is linked to body and bodies, and bodies are linked to bodies that include machines (computers are a clear but not the only example of networks of humans and machines, with the networks and the humans doing real work to continue the life of the network). 


The pendulum swings from the philosophizing of the fifty year old to the fifty year old body and the self wound around each other like DNA strands. We talk about global warming and then about the confusions of gender, of power, of communication, of media, of humans cut off from feedback loops and thus unaware of the shit that is about to hit the world's fan. 


So perhaps once in a while one's body must be injured, so that the insult of not knowing is again felt, like a hot lash, a slap, a wakeup call. 


PS when I searched for a Parrish image of Kelsey I found this as the caption:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

  Masahide