Being judged too tall to race leaves blade runner in no man’s land

Blake Leeper could be the first double amputee to win an Olympic track medal next summer — if he is six inches shorter by then. The American blade runner, who has made the top despite a

struggle with alcoholism and a cocaine exile, is now heading for another court battle after accusing World Athletics of racial discrimination. Even by athletics’ standards for controversy,

Leeper’s story is remarkable. The crux is the equation used to calculate the maximum allowable standing height (Mash) for those using prosthetic legs, which are permitted if they do not

provide an artificial advantage. Leeper, who is black, stands just over 6ft 2in on his blades. The governing body claim he would be 5ft 9in with biological legs but his blades give him the

legs of a 6ft 8in man and a performance benefit. The Mash equation was changed in 2018, but Leeper claims the evidence is flawed and did not consider differences between racial groups. After

losing out in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) this week, he will now take his case to the Swiss Supreme Court. Leeper, a 31-year-old from Tennessee, is fast. He was second to Oscar

Pistorius in the T44 400 metres Paralympic final in 2012. His best time of 44.3 seconds is faster than any non-disabled athlete this year. He says he is the same height as Pistorius, who

did get to run at the Olympics after a bitter battle with the governing body. “Initially it was all about the blades and the return of energy, my VO2 max, the top-end speed, but suddenly

it’s just about height,” he told _The Times_ of his fight to prove his blades are fair. “My lawyers asked where they got their numbers from to say I’m too tall. It was only Caucasians and

Asians in the test study. “Sometimes Casucasians have smaller torsos, some black men are known to have longer legs. At least throw in a few black people to see _if_ there is any disparity. I

thought they were discriminating against me because of my disability, but they ended up discriminating against me because of my race. It needs to be investigated.” Advertisement World

Athletics “strongly rejected” the allegation that the finding that Leeper “runs tall” is based on a “racist” Paralympic rule. They said there was “no proof that African-American athletes

have significantly different body dimensions and certainly not to the extent identified in this case”. Leeper, though, is now in no man’s land, unable to run at either the Olympics or

Paralympics. He says using radically different prosthetics would be impossible with Tokyo only nine months away. “You couldn’t do this if the blades were too long,” he says. “It’d be like

riding a bike that’s too tall for you. I’ve been training and competing at a certain height for ten years and they want me to start from scratch. It would be like playing golf for years and

then making the PGA Tour and being told you needed a new set of clubs. My height’s been the same all this time but my times have dropped. It’s obviously not my height.” He has already scored

a partial victory. CAS invalidated World Athletics’ 2015 rule which says the burden of proof is on the athlete to demonstrate that prosthetics provide no advantage. The next stage will be

harder, but he has New York law firm, Winston & Strawn, working pro-bono for him. Leeper has another reason to keep fighting. In 2012 his grandmother tapped Pistorius on his shoulder

after he had just beaten Leeper in that Paralympic final in London. “He thought she was a fan wanting a picture, but she said, ‘Hey, I’m Blake’s grandmother and he’s going to get you next

time.’ ” They never got the chance. The following year Pistorius murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. Leeper, meanwhile, was struggling with alcoholism and a recreational drug habit

that led to him being banned. As a result he did not make it to Rio either. “My gran came home and told everybody we were going to Rio, but I messed up,” he says. “We couldn’t go because of

my mistakes. I let her down and I promised her we would go to Tokyo instead. Unfortunately, she passed away, but if she’s not with me in a physical sense I know she is in a spiritual one,

and that’s a promise I am going to keep.” Advertisement How did a man with so many problems win silver and bronze in London and then five Paralympic medals before taking Pistorius’ world

record? “I was what you’d call a functioning alcoholic,” he says. “When I tested positive for cocaine, that was rock bottom, but the beautiful part of it was it saved my life. I learnt tools

about how to cope with life — ‘I don’t have to go get drunk no more, I don’t have to get high no more’. They were self-inflicted but I’ve already been through tough times.” He lost his

sponsors. He even lost his blades. The ban made him think about where he had come from. Born without legs, he played baseball and basketball but had an addictive personality. Now he is clean

and sober and wants to be judged only by his work. At the end of last year he proposed to Sadie. Thea arived three months ago, named after Althea Gibson, the first African American to win

one of tennis’s grand-slam events in 1956. “She is the best thing in my life and I need her right now,” he says. “I see this as the making of a champion. I am being tested. It would be easy

to sit back and cry, but if I do that they win.” The pre-infamy Pistorius won the right to run against the non-disabled and won a relay silver medal at the 2011 World Athletics Championships

before making the 2012 Olympics. When he lost the 200m final at the Paralympics in London later that year he said the winner, Brazil’s Alan Oliveira, had “unbelievably” long legs and his

height was four inches more than it should be. World Para Athletics was already years into a Classification Research Project and in 2017 said the existing Mash formula overestimated

athletes’ height by an average of six to eight centimetres. Leeper’s team say his arm span of 6ft 1in fits his height and Dr Hugh Herr, a biomechanics expert from MIT, is behind him.

“Current evidence does not support the conclusion that running taller means a person will run faster,” he said. “More fundamentally, relying on limited studies that exclude persons of

African descent is inexplicable and unjustifiable.” Advertisement This summer Caster Semenya also went to the Swiss court in a last bid to run in the female category at the Olympic Games.

She lost. Leeper empathises. “The parallel is a system that goes against basic human rights,” he says. “Their attitude is, ‘We can do what we want.’ “Me and my black friends are used to

being discriminated against at home because of the colour of our skin. We’d go somewhere and they’d say it was the wardrobe, the hat we’re wearing, anything to kick us out. The racism itself

hurt but you knew the people it was coming from. They were ignorant and didn’t know any better. This hurts more. I don’t get that they won’t even look at this. That’s the worst feeling in

the world, but they are not going to shut me up.”