Here’s another article I liked from UniversalSports.com. It’s another one by Steve Goldberg: “The Evolution of the Paralympics Wheelchair.”
BEIJING — A prosthetic leg that will allow a man to run 100 meters under 11 seconds, a wheelchair that is so light and responsive that a basketball player can weave and turn through defenders with speed yet remain durable in a physical game or a racing chair in which a marathoner will complete more than 26 miles in less than 90 minutes.
When all is said and done, it is still the human machine that makes the difference but the advances in technology that have allowed the Paralympic athlete to perform at his or her best are nothing short of amazing.
It’s no different than the Olympic Games where advances in technology and materials have led to greater achievements by athletes from cyclists and pole vaulters to sailors, archers, skiers and bobsledders.
The situation of bilateral amputee Oscar Pistorius in his bid to compete for the South African Olympic team made global news over the past year as the technology and comparison of his carbon fiber running legs were debated by the IAAF and later the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Pistorius won the 100-meter sprint gold medal on Tuesday night at the Olympic Stadium Bird’s Nest. In the odd coincidence that one could only find in a Paralympic Games, American Brian Frasure, who won the bronze medal, is also the prosthetist who helped build Pistorius’s first running legs five years ago. Also lining up in the race was former Paralympic champion and world record holder Marlon Shirley who was instrumental in the design of the carbon fiber “Cheetah” foot made by Ossur that has helped Pistorius maximize his own abilities.
“The goal,” says Frasure, “is to get as close as possible to what they lost.”
With less fanfare, the development of sport specific wheelchairs has been critical to the increased performance of the athletes here in Beijing for the Paralympic Games.
“I think that it’s athlete driven, the move to more sophisticated technology,” says Phil Craven, the former Great Britain international wheelchair basketball player who is now the president of the International Paralympic Committee.
“When I started wheelchair basketball, there were regulations that everybody had to have the same chair. So, if you were 6’6” or 5’10” you had the same chair.”
Another regulation that today’s athlete would find abhorrent, was that all chairs had to have handles on the back, a concession to the dominant manufacturers of the time that were more interested in their needs than that of the athlete.
“I was the fastest man in the world in 1976,” laughs former Paralympic athlete and coach David Kiley, a man known more for his achievements on the basketball court than on the track. What amuses him is that he gained that title with a 100-meter wheelchair sprint of 19 seconds in the Toronto Paralympic Games. That wouldn’t even get him into the field now when the world record, set by Finland’s Leo-Pekka Thati in 2006, is 13.88.
He recalls that technology had just taken a great leap forward. “It was a standard manufacturer’s chair, mostly heavy steel folding chairs made by Everest & Jennings or Stainless Medical Products that you cut and chopped into a race chair.
“That’s all there was,” he says referring to the folding chairs. “They were lighter than typical hospital chairs but still very heavy.”
He says that the improvements at the time on the four wheelchairs included getting the knees up higher and a smaller push ring.
“Racing chairs began to develop by athletes building their own. We were all just playing around, trying to make these things go faster. We were cutting down backs and taking off the brakes.”
The modified chairs were scarce and Kiley recalls that in relays, it was not uncommon to share chairs, using two chairs for four racers.
Kiley is a Michael Jordan of sorts as he was the first wheelchair basketball player to have his name on a specific sport specific wheelchair, the Quickie All Court, which has become the chair of choice for many top players around the world such as Canada’s Patrick Anderson and the USA’s Jeff Glasbrenner.
“It gives me the ability to be the best that I can be,” says Glasbrenner. “The chair is an extension of my body and without that, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that I can do.”
A single leg amputee, Glasbrenner will be relying on prosthetic technology when he competes in the Iron Man Triathlon World Championships a few weeks after the games.
About 30 years ago while athletes like Henk Mackenzie, a basketball player from Holland were experimenting with odd notions like camber in Europe and Bud Rumple was building rigid box frames for his Detroit Sparks basketball players, Kiley was part of a parallel group he calls “a speed bunch” in California including Rod Williams and Garry Kerr, multi-sport athletes like himself who knew there was a better way. He says Williams, the first to use a smaller push ring on a racing chair, also devised “a little block that would create camber,” which, without question, has been one of the most significant developments in sports chairs.
“All of a sudden, you were turning like crazy.”
Craven remembers his first chair with camber in 1979. “It was an amazing opening up of the possibilities.”
Another Californian who would make a significant impact on the future of sports wheelchairs was Marilyn Hamilton, the founder of Motion Designs now know as Quickie, which was bought by Sunrise Medical in 1986 and joined in 1992 by the German based innovator Sopur, founded by former Paralympic track and handcycle racer Errol Marklein.
Twice a U.S. Open tennis champion as well as a Paralympic silver medalist in the 1984 Winter Games, Hamilton wasn’t happy with the performance of the equipment available, either in her personal life or on the court.
Hamilton, whose tennis chair is now a part of the Smithsonian Museum collection in Washington, D.C., was also the first person who realized that wheelchairs didn’t have to be the same color. It’s an innovation that while not necessarily technical, has been compared to the evolution from black and white television to color and is now everywhere.
Before Hamilton, the first athlete to take their own innovations to a broader market as a business was Jeff Minnebraker in the early 1980’s. It was Minnebraker who influenced others such as Brad Parks, who is credited with being the primary force behind the growth of wheelchair tennis. Minnebraker’s company, Quadra, the first real sports wheelchair manufacturer, made custom-built anodized and welded frames. He is also credited with developing the quick-release axel which is now standard.
As an athlete, Hamilton recognized that innovation in sports chairs was an opportunity as much as a need and pushed the research and development of better equipment for tennis, basketball and track. “You have to be responsive to the needs of the athlete. We don’t tell them what they need; they tell us and then we work with them with our engineers to continually improve the product.”
As the responsibility for modifying and improving the function and performance of a chair has moved away from the athlete, though that is still where much of the necessary information on how improvements can be made comes from, the performances have improved exponentially.
Along with Quickie and Sopur, both part of Sunrise Medical, other companies including Otto Bock, Invacare, Meyer and RGK are producing sport specific wheelchairs as the demand increases, not just for elite athletes but for recreational athletes around the world.
Previously left to their own designs, there is now a school of science with experts and engineers from many disciplines working with athletes to continually improve the equipment.
Tim Raiskup, who had worked on Indy racing cars for Penske Racing drivers such as Emerson Fittipaldi, Rick Mears and Danny Sullivan, has been an engineer for Quickie going on ten years.
As racing chairs developed into the three wheel chariots that we see today, the chairs used for basketball and tennis were still pretty much the same. A couple of years after the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games, Raiskup says that a mandate came down to create a specific basketball chair.
“We developed that chair with Dave Kiley’s help and a focus group of basketball players he brought in. We were probably one of the first specific chairs that was created for the sport of basketball. It became the All Court.”
When we first started this, the basketball players were just a straightforward push from one end to the other, bang into each other type of arrangement. Now, these guys are bouncing up on one wheel to get higher, they are falling over with the chair on top of them and getting back up with a simple push up. Trying to meet those needs and create something that survives these guys’ activities now is very different. It has to be light and responsive and very durable.
He says that one of the biggest recent innovations has been the addition of the integral anti-tip bars. It was begun in tennis but when it was applied to basketball, he says that, “it allowed these guys to play more aggressively. It allows the chair to be more of a mid-wheel than rear wheel, making it more responsive. Before to turn quickly on a dime, a player would have to physically ‘wheelie’ (pull back onto just the rear wheels) and transfer their weight.
As materials go, the chairs have evolved from steel to aluminum to titanium, which had previously been very expensive and time consuming to work with.
“The ability to get it and fabricate it in an economical fashion has been a recent change. It has allowed us to do what we need to meet the athletes’ needs with far less time required. The development of this in our everyday chairs has allowed us to bring it into the sports market.”
Former Paralympic champion Monique Kalkman, the first in the great line of female Dutch tennis stars that is now led by world number one Esther Vergeer, says that the adjustability of chairs like the Quickie Match Point have given the players the chance to combine greater seating height, which can add significant velocity to serves with the agile mobility prerequisite to moving about the court. Lighter in weight and extremely responsive, it allows wheelchair players more time to prepare their shots.
“If you can’t get there, you can’t hit it,” she says.
“In tennis it is important to be quick in your first push and in your turns,” adds Vergeer. “With my Match Point, it doesn’t take you much to do that. You don’t lose energy, power or strength pushing your chair so the pushing is very efficient.”
Efficiency is also the hallmark of racing chairs where the evolution from boxy four wheelers to long and sleek aerodynamic, graphite wheeled rockets has created a reverse paradigm where it is the Paralympic athlete that excels in longer distances.
Switzerland’s Heinz Frei, the winner of 96 marathons, hold’s the world’s best official marathon time of 1:20:14, set in 1999 in Oita, Japan. By comparison, Kenyan Paul Tergat’s world record of 2:04:55 set last September for an able-bodied runner is more than 44 minutes slower.
While durability is important, such as in the rough and tumble physicality of the men’s 1,500-meter semifinal races run here in Athens, the need for speed is the most critical element.
That’s why an elite athlete such as now retired Tanni Grey Thompson of Great Britain thought it was such a wonderful first gift her husband Ian gave her on their first date, a Sopur carbon fiber front wheel. Her friends were appalled. She loved it. “For a wheelchair racer it was a pretty sexy thing actually.”
The track and road racing chairs and to an even greater extent, handcycling chairs share the same kind of technology that is found in bikes ridden in the Tour de France.
Where will it go from here? The change has been coming so rapidly that the technology has possibly caught up to and perhaps exceeded the athlete. But as Olympic and Paralympic history shows, that won’t last for long and more innovation will come down the line with each new step giving greater edge to the human machine.
