Flutterby™! : Double amputee to try out for Olympics

Double amputee runner Oscar Pistorius has won a ruling allowing him to try out for a spot in the Olympics:

The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations.

The IAAF had previously ruled that the carbon fiber blades that he strapped to his legs gave him an advantage. I find this interesting on two fronts.

First, this seems like a great place to look at drug use in sports. If someone else has a genetic predisposition towards better, say, blood oxygenation, or maybe a childhood disease left an athlete anemic, where does the slope start?

Second, what happens when a runner decides they'd be faster on carbon fiber and cuts off their feet in order to compete?

I think this really shows up the silliness of sport as anything other than a training mechanism: At some point it's just an arbitrary optimization of a rule set, and though it's great to cheer that on, why are we cheering on people who optimize that rule set and not other ones, like, say, stock markets?

I go back to my comparison that if people were consistent about their sports enthusiasm, San Franciscan's would riot and trash the city every time Charles Schwab had a good year.