Passage B Are humans or technology breaking Olympic records?
1.When Oscar Pistorius fought successfully to compete in the 2012 London Olympic Games with his two artificial legs, he challenged many people’s Olympian ideal of celebrating human athletic performance without technological support or other aids.
2.Yet the attention focused on Pistorius, whose name has earned him the nickname “Blade Runner,”has mostly failed to notice technology’s role in helping humans break Olympic records over the past decades.
3.“The Pistorius case alone reveals the deep irony in society’s views toward technology in sports and normal life,”said Brittain, author of The Paralympic Games Explained. He points out that society tends to view disabled people as being at a disadvantage because their bodies are different, yet Pistorius received criticism for having an unfair advantage with his artificial legs and becoming in a sense “more than human.”
Technological booster shot
4. Generally, Olympic sports have drawn wide attention more often for taking a position against “technological doping”rather than cheering on new technological breakthroughs.
5. The full-body swimsuit was banned after athletes who wore Speedo’s LZR Racer swimsuit won 94 percent of the swimming medals and broke 15 long-course world records at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. But according to a report called Sports Engineering: An Unfair Advantage? Such bans can’t avoid the fact that “technology is as much a part of an athlete’s resources as nutrition, training and coaching.”react to啥意思
6. Steve Haake, a sports engineer in the UK, has studied technology’s contribution to better Olympic performances. He found that technology alone contributed to a 30 percent increase in both pole vaulting and javelin performances. Technology played an even bigger role in cycling. Nearly 100 percent out of the 221 percent overall improvement in the one-hour cycling record came from better technology, according to Haake. The arms and legs race
7. It’s true that better technology has shaped the Olympics, but people want to celebrate athletes for their hard work rather than their use of the latest sports technology. David James, a sports engineer, discovered the

版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198，我们将在24小时内删除。