Even faster, even higher, even stronger.

When I was little, the lady who lived across the road for us was involved with a charity called Riding for the Disabled which taught children with disabilities to ride horses. Seeing as she lived across the road and I liked horses, I'd scamper over to watch and occasionally help out in a small way.
Anyway, on one occasion the group gave a demonstration at Doncaster Racecourse; I'm not sure from memory what was going on - whether it was a fundraising event, or if it was a gloriously politically incorrect seventies event where the disabled kids were wheeled out. I just can't remember - but one of the children hadn't shown up and so I was shanghaied in to fill the gap. A riding hat was put on my head, I was stuck on a pony, and my mum whispered to me "Just look stupid and don't say anything".

You'll be pleased to know I did at least half of that very easily.

Anyway, that was my first experience of disabled sport, and I've got to be honest I've not paid much attention since right up until this year when, like pretty much everyone else, I was completely wrongfooted by the Olympics. Not only were the games not rubbish like I'd been gloomily expecting, but I spent the better part of a month in a state of mild shock at some of the stuff I was seeing. Firstly at the main games, when I developed a hitherto unknown interest in sports like Shooting, Dressage and Cycling (and anywhere else that the British were trouncing the rest of the world), but then at the Paralympics as well where I found myself watching with occasional bursts of awe. "Hang on", I'd say to myself. "That fellow with no legs and only one arm can swim three times faster than me, and then make jokes about it", or "A man with no arms just won the archery? You have got to be yanking my chain."

I suppose the first time I really thought about the paralympics was a few years ago when I was out on the track and got lapped by a man with one leg, but what really caught my attention was when earlier this year when Oscar Pistorius' request to take part in the main games was rejected by the IOC on the basis that having no legs gave him an unfair advantage in the sprinting. I don't know about you, but when someone says that having no legs is an unfair advantage it's the sort of comment that makes me take notice. I was very pleased he got to complete in the main games, and from the reactions of the other athletes, so were they.

But it's this blurring of the lines between Olympics and Paralympics which interests me, and I think shows us a start of a new trend. From being a disadvantage, having a disability can now be (under some specific circumstances for the moment) an actual advantage. The world has shifted in a way I don't think anyone really expected. There have been calls for the Olympics and Paralympics to merge, but that's not going to happen; what's going to happen is that in twenty or thirty of fifty years there simply won't be a paralympics any more as we know it. As technology catches and excedes what the standard-issue human body can do, the paralympics will mutate and we'll have the Olympics and the Enhanced Olympics. Nobody can know if Oscar Pistorius or David Weir would be as good at their sports, or better, or worse, if they weren't disabled so suggestions that the events should be merged with teh able-bodied ones won't happen. What will happen is that technology will continue improving and will inevitably surpass the human body in more areas. Limbless people will run and swim faster, jump higher, and be stronger than the rest of us.

Suddenly, the unfair advantage seems an interesting glimpse of another world.