PHOTO: OTTO BOCK

IN ACTION: Engineers design prostheses for use in various sports.

Meet Oscar Pistorius, a boyish 18-year-old high school student from Pretoria, South Africa, who was born with a congenital condition that left him with lower legs but no feet. In January 2004, nevertheless, Oscar decided to try running track, after an injury forced him to give up his spot as a second-string player on the school rugby team. An athlete by nature, he wasn't about to let the fact that he was a double amputee stop him from breaking a sweat on the field.

What nobody anticipated is that he would also start to break records.

At first Pistorius ran on a pair of improvised prostheses built by an engineer from a South African aircraft company. But his new carbon-fiber running feet, had an unnerving tendency to shatter, so Oscar's prosthetist put him in touch with an American colleague, Brian Frasure. Not only was 34-year-old Frasure a highly experienced prosthetist—a profession he chose after losing a leg trying to hop a moving train while in college—he also held the world record in the 200 meter dash for amputees, a blistering 22.69 seconds, barely 3 seconds shy of the able-bodied mark.

So in June last year Pistorius went to Charlotte, N. C., where Frasure fitted him with a new pair of cutting-edge, sickle-shaped feet made by Ossur specifically adapted to the young athlete's weight and preferred distance, also the 200. The results were staggering: in a couple of months Pistorius lopped nearly 3 seconds off his best time, an improvement that Frasure described as "unheard of" in a sport in which sprinters are ecstatic if they can trim a tenth of a second off their race. On 22 September 2004 at the Athens Paralympics, Pistorius became the first amputee to break the 22-second barrier in the 200, clocking a phenomenal 21.97.

Frasure-the-runner saw the fruits of his labors as Frasure-the-prosthetist from up close that day: he was on the track next to Pistorius when his patient-turned-protégé thundered past him on his way to shattering the American's world record. "I should have waited until next year to make his legs," Frasure said wryly, with a wan smile. To put Pistorius's achievement and potential in perspective, consider this: the able-bodied world record for 200 meters is 19.32 seconds, and the qualifying time for a South African sprinter going to the Olympics would be 20.75 seconds. Pistorius shaved another tenth of a second off his Athens record earlier this year, which puts him barely over 1 second shy of a the time he needs to have a shot at participating in the world's premier sporting event. Taking into account the fact that, in his own words, "sprinters usually peak somewhere between 26 and 29 years old," his chances of lining up one day in the starting blocks shoulder-to-shoulder with the fastest males on the planet seem fair to excellent. "I have no doubt that Oscar will eventually run fast enough to compete in an able World Championship," Frasure said in April. "He could be ready to qualify for South Africa by the 2008 Olympics," he added, agreeing that Pistorius is probably a decade away from his physical peak.

There's more. Everyone close to Pistorius agrees that his greatest potential lies in an event that he has only begun to run in competition: the 400. The fact that he is a bilateral amputee slows Pistorius down as he comes out of the starting blocks. Once he builds up speed, however, that same liability becomes an asset: his balanced and extra-long stride—of which more below—give him "a top speed that is ridiculous," comments American sprinter Marlon Shirley, the only amputee to have ever run the 100 meter dash in under 11 seconds.

To what extent can Pistorius's jaw-dropping performance be attributed to his innate talent and determination, and to what extent is it a by-product of technology? Even on technical grounds, there is no clear answer. Factor in the fundamental issue of fairness, and the waters get even muddier. "The ethical question that has to be resolved—but which so far hasn't even been profoundly addressed—is how to distinguish fair advantages that emerge from technology from unfair ones," comments Anita Silvers, an ethicist in San Francisco State University's philosophy department who has written extensively on disability.

To date, none of the relevant able-bodied sports federations, national or international, have an opinion on the matter, official or otherwise. "This is a big surprise to me," the IAAF's Gyulail said earlier this year, though he acknowledged that Pistorius's performance suggests that an amputee running fast enough to qualify for the Olympics is now "clearly a possibility." Disabled sports federations, prompted by a complaint from the U.S. Paralympics committee, are currently rewriting the rules on prostheses, which should be in force for the 2008 Games in Beijing.