How do you feel about this?
A girl on her high school track team who uses a wheelchair is seeking a federal court order that would let her take part in the same races as her fellow students. She's allowed to be in the team's practices, but the school system requires her to participate in separate races during official events. Since she's generally the only one at the meets in
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The chair looks quite bulky (see my reply above to mactavish for links to the photos) and appears to barely fit into the lane -- if the lanes are standard width, it looks like the chair was made to ride right on the lines on both sides, which means inevitably that she's going to wobble into the adjacent lanes at times in the heat of competition. But are runners supposed to stay in their lane? I thought that's where they start out but once they get going they can move in toward the middle if they can (?). If that's true, I can just picture a knot of runners coming up behind the chair and having to split to go around it. Since nobody would know which direction any given runner was going to go, I can imagine collisions, falls and injuries would be the result.
On the other hand if she is kept to an outside line while the runners move to the inside, then she is going around the track by herself, and it makes little difference what the others are doing. I would think it would feel worse to have the others finish while you're still going around and around ... instead of running her own race she's an anticlimax, listening to the cheering and whistling for the winner while she still has laps and laps to go alone. She's still spending much of her "race" going around alone anyway!
There's a follow-up story today and the crux of the whole situation, in my view, is in a quote from, of all people, an advocate for disabled athletes:If it's not the same competition, they shouldn't be on the track at the same time.
I'll post a new entry with the update.
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