paralympians show their mettle
Ouch, no pun intended.
I had the pleasure of popping up to the aquatic center the other day to watch the paralympians perform in the pool and my, can they swim. As several of you will already know I like to splash about a bit but realising that the guy with no arms and no legs is completing the 200m about twenty seconds faster I could (on a good day) kinda puts the right perspective around it! Good on the lot of them.
One thing I did notice though was how several of the competitors really thumped themselves before starting and a couple appeared to be giving themselves a pretty hard time of it. This, as it turns out, could well have been a sign of the recently uncovered paralympic practice of ‘boosting’.
Excessive sweating and shaking, often seen in athletes at the beginning of wheelchair or swimming events, may not be simply the result of a nervous excitement but could be a tell-tale sign of performance boosting – a banned method of enhancing performance through self-harm. A recent survey suggests that one in five athletes at Beijing with spinal injuries used it to improve their times and chances of ‘medalling’. And there’s no reason to doubt any less chance of the practice continuing in London 2012.
As it turns out, people with severe spinal injuries don’t only lose use of their limbs, they also tend to lose brain control of their cardiovascular system, with the result that their bodies do not respond to exercise. Just think for a second what that means: no matter how much they exercise or how hard they work, their heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen usage does not change in the slightest, which obviously impacts their ability to go faster and improve their performance. Boosting helps overcome this disadvantage.
When the athlete injures or harms their body by severely pinching, punching it or pricking themselves with a needle, it stimulates or kick-starts the body into a stress reaction. Though they feel no pain whatsoever, their blood pressure and heart rate rises, thus allowing an increased blood/oxygen flow to their muscles and, voila, increased performance! The downside is that the brain can not regulate or moderate the body’s response to the emergency which is why the athlete sweats and shakes like a scouser in the dock. In extreme cases, a fatal stroke or heart attack is going to be the outcome.
This, along with the Blade Runner’s undignified ‘sore-losing’ outburst, shows me the paralympians are just as motivated by the ideals of today’s sport as are all Olympians and they all want to win just as badly.
