Abstract
Similar to able-bodied sprinters, most of the medals for the 100-m sprint in past Paralympic Games and IPC Athletics World Championships were dominated by West African (WA) and Caucasian (CC) amputee sprinters, not Asian (AS) sprinters. Although these results indicate differences in sprint performance due to ethnicity, little is known about the ethnicity and spatiotemporal parameters of the 100-m sprint for amputee sprinters. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in the spatiotemporal parameters of WA, CC and AS sprinters with bilateral and unilateral transtibial amputations during a 100-m sprint. We analyzed 6 WA, 28 CC, and 10 AS amputee sprinters from publicly available Internet broadcasts. For each sprinter’s run, the average speed, average step length, and step frequency were calculated by using the number of steps in conjunction with the official race time. No significant differences were found in the spatiotemporal parameters of the 100-m sprint for the WA and CC groups. On the other hand, the average speed of the AS group was significantly lower because of its shorter step length during the 100-m sprint. The results suggest that WA and CC sprinters would perform similarly during a 100-m sprint, but AS sprinters would not.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40064-016-1983-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The development of running-specific prostheses (RSPs) has allowed runners with initial lower extremity amputations to compete at levels never before achieved (Hobara et al 2015a)
There was no significant difference in S100 between the West African (WA) and CC groups, S100 was significantly lower for the AS group (P < 0.01)
There was no significant differences in Lstep between the WA and CC groups, while Lstep was significantly shorter for the AS group
Summary
The development of running-specific prostheses (RSPs) has allowed runners with initial lower extremity amputations to compete at levels never before achieved (Hobara et al 2015a). According to the 2015 International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Athletics Official World Rankings (T43 and T44 classes), the fastest times by West African (WA) sprinters (10.61 s) and Caucasian (CC) sprinters (10.71 s) have a gap of only 0.10 s (as of Hobara et al SpringerPlus (2016) 5:343. Similar to able-bodied sprinters, most of the medals for the 100-m sprint in past Paralympic Games and IPC Athletics World Championships were dominated by WA and CC amputee sprinters, not AS sprinters. These results indicate differences in sprint performance due to ethnicity may exist in amputee sprinters
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