A South African sports scientist has described the decision to allow Oscar Pistorius to compete at this month's World Athletics Championships as a 'farce' and has claimed the sprinter's prosthetic limbs give him a 10-second advantage.
The four-time Paralympic gold medallist has been selected to race against able-bodied runners in a global championships for the first time in Daegu after setting a 400 metres personal best of 45.07 seconds.
Pistorius was initially banned by the IAAF after it was ruled his carbon-fibre blades gave him an advantage but that decision was overturned ahead of the 2008 Olympics, which the 24-year-old would have been eligible for had he run the qualifying time.
But Dr Ross Tucker, a senior lecturer with the University of Cape Town's Exercise Science and Sports Medicine Department, believes the decision was flawed and has compared the engineering involved with that of Formula One.
Dr Tucker said: "I don't think he should be running. I think he gets an enormous advantage, and two of his own scientists who did the testing to clear him recently published a paper saying that he had a 10-second advantage.
"The media never picked up on this, but the short version is that the Court of Arbitration decision that cleared him was a complete farce, scientifically, as was the testing that got him off.
"I don't wish to watch Formula One where the engineers can tinker with equipment to find half a second, and that seems to me to be a possibility in this instance."
