Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Cheater!
I stumbled across a report yesterday on Nightline about a guy who is an aspiring Olympic runner. The catch - he doesn't have any feet. He uses special "Cheetah" prosthetic feet, which have a very high efficiency in transmitting the spring energy stored in them. You might have also seen one of these on a recent season of The Amazing Race. Unfortunately, whereas the human ankle is 88% efficient, the Cheetah foot is 91% efficient, so the Olympic officials have barred this guy from eligibility for using performance aids. I say just customize his feet to be a bit less efficient and let him run. He's obviously naturally fast and would be with natural feet or prosthetics. Anyone else with me on this?
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3 comments:
I also have seen this, and believe he should be able to compete. He could drop the efficiency to that equal a human, and there should be an exception.
Your engineering solution amuses me. I'm 100% with you on this, but the rest of the world doesn't think in terms of engineering the efficiency of a runner's ankles...
I agree with that. Everyone should be given a chance to compete.
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