When Will Paralympic Athletes Surpass Olympic Athletes?

Factual Questions
1

Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man on Earth. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s nearly as good as a human being is going to get. Maybe cutting off a few hundreths or a tenth of a second is possible, but not a whole lot more.

Oscar Pistorius is one of the best disabled sprinters around, some even arguing his prosthesis gives him an advantage.

So the question is, when will prosthetic limbs be better than the best athletes natural ones? When will a comparably trained man born without legs be able to beat a Usain Bolt?

Note: No cheating by using robot suits or what have you. Artificial limbs only.

2

How are you going to distinguish between advanced prostheses and “robotic suits”?

Depending on the event, the paralympic athletes are already faster. Wheelchair races, for example, are significantly quicker than footraces, past a certain distance. (I think the cutoff is around 10,000m, but I honestly haven’t bothered to look it up exactly.)

3

I think the simplest way is the prosthesis can’t be powered, other than to pick up signals from the body.

As for wheelchairs, that’s not really surprising, but I had limbs in mind. (Side question: Why the cutoff? My best guess is that your arms would wear out much quicker than your legs.)

4

You can coast in a wheelchair and give your arms a quick break. Wheels are way more efficient than legs on a smooth surface, and these are the most efficient wheels on earth.

5

The real advantage that the wheelchairs have is that they can coast, basically. It’s rather like rowing versus swimming. Over short distances, this isn’t an issue. Also, legs are much stronger than arms, so they can accelerate you out of the blocks faster. (not to mention that there are blocks to push off in the first place!)

The longer the distance, the greater the disparity, because they’re just faster.

Here’s the results from the Beijing Paralympics marathon. Every single finisher blew the current world record (2:03) in the marathon out of the water. I was wrong about where the cutoff is for wheelchairs being faster, though. It’s actually between 400 and 800 meters that the wheelchairs pass the runners.