Judging by two news spurts this week, sprinters who worry that some lower-leg amputee, maybe even a double amputee, will sproing past on strapped-on hardware at the next meet and have the Americans with Disabilities Act or sports regulators or others to protect his or her advantage, they should relax. That is, relax and look down at their own feet to see if they have the natural equipment to go exceedingly fast and do it soon after a gun goes off.
On the prosthetics front, a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters concluded, after tests of the force that intact legs and shorter ones aided with spring-like blades exert on the ground, found no advantage for those wearing the latest running hardware. One imagines that engineers eventually may come up with something that outdoes people with entirely self-grown limbs, but so far not so, so it says here.
Stories:
- Pop. Science – Stuart Fox: Study Proves That Specialized Prosthetic Legs Grant No Advantage in Sprinting ; Really proves it? That’s an inflexible verb, prone to breakage under pressure. “Concludes” is more letters but more apt, and safer. The story, and a runner’s flex-foot prosthesis, has more bend in it than this hed – one that the writer may, to be sure, never have seen before it hit the ether.
- AAAS ScienceNOW – Michael Torrice: No Sprinting Advantage With Prosthetic Limbs ;
- LA Times (blog) Jeannine Stein : Another study weighs in on amputee runners ; More accurate hed but, one must also say, less alluring that an inflexible assertion of new truth.
- Boston Globe : MIT Media Lab unveils study on amputee runners ;
- Guardian (UK) Alok Jha: Prosthetics don’t give sprinters an unfair advantage, research suggests ;
- RT (Russian Eng. Lang TV/on line News): No unfair advantage in sprint blades – study ; Pretty slick little write up.
Grist for the Mill:
MIT Media Lab Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ;
As for fully Natural Feet…
Coincident to the word on contemporary running prosthetics was publication this week of a study of the feet of top sprinters compared to those of the rest of us. Penn State U. researchers say in the Journal of Experimental Biology that the top speed and, perhaps more important, the acceleration out of the blocks needed to compete at the top level go with long toes and ankle bones that give calf muscles an advantage.
Hmmm. What are the regs governing surgical alteration in sports? How hard could be it to lengthen a big toe just a smoodge – break it, stretch it a bit in a brace, and do whatever orthopedists do to encourage a strong mend that spans the little gap? Just wondering. But maybe if one sees a runner with kind’a long shoes, better check the toes and maybe the back of the heel for scars (or some kind of strap on toe-extenders).
Stories:
- Scientific American – Karen Hopkin: (podcast transcipt) Good Sprinters Have Long Toes ;
- Wired News – Hadley Leggett : Short Heels and Long Toes: A Surprising Recipe for Speed: Good explanation, from biophysiokinesiology (if that’s a word), why the short heel produces a more forceful lever against the ground. It is not intuitive. Also gets into the evolutionary competition between speed and endurance that shaped human feet. (Adventures in typo-land dept: Tracker’s first composition rendered the byline as Hardly Leggett. Seemed apt for a piece on feet.) It also links to a previous story by Wired’s Brandon Keim on the reason our toes are pretty short.
- Discovery News (via MSNBC) Emily Sohn: Fast runners have shorter heels, longer toes ;
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Kim McGuire: Longer toes, unique ankle structure aids sprinters ; Hmmm – is something unique if it is merely a spot on a continuum? The piece is too short to elicit much further comment. Except maybe its remark about what we see in other people’s sandles.
- Special award to Daily Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne : Longer toes and shorter legs make you a faster runner ; Only piece Tracker saw that played up the shorter leg (calf part) angle. It’s not shorter legs, perhaps, as much as shorter shins (0r, explicitly, fibular head to lateral malleolus, although those words don’t come up in this piece). This account also includes some specific numbers on the differences in average size of various limb bits between those with gold medals and those watching from the stands. One suspects that Mr. Alleyne read not only the press release, but the paper, and made up his mind all by himself as to what to emphasize. Salute.
Grist for the Mill:
Penn State U. Press Release ; Journal Article summary and Full Text ;
- Charlie Petit
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