Body Scope in Sport:

How Should Athletes with Prosthetic Legs Be Understood?

Abstract

  In this study, the bodies of athletes with prosthetic legs are examined, considering Oscar Pistorius’s and Markus Rehm’s challenge to the Paralympic/Olympic order as a case study. The “issues” of athletes with prosthetic legs could be regarded as “excesses” from the natural body as assumed by modern sport.

  A further discussion of cyborg body metaphors was examined. This metaphor fails to answer the question of why Pistorius and Rehm were excluded from the Olympics. An instance of a tennis player with a prosthetic racket, for example, represents a failure of the Cyborg metaphor. This case reveals that we are trying to overly embody prosthetic legs.

  The issue with prosthetic legs is related to the heterogeneity of the body, which emerges when the “artificial device” becomes “body.” Results show that categorical misunderstandings about externalities and internalities have obscured the argument about the range of bodies in sports.