ATHENS, Sept. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- A prosthetic leg that will allow aman 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 at a speed yet remains 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 the technology that allows a Paralympic athlete to perform at his or her best is 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 development of sport specific wheelchairs has been criticalto the increased performance of the athletes here in Athens for the 12th 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 (IPC).

    "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 athletes would find abhorrent today wasthat 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 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 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 Australian Geoff Trappett last year, is 13.99 seconds.

    He recalled 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 wheel chairs 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, in Athens as an assistant coach for the United States basketball team, is a... Michael Jordan of sorts as he is the first wheelchair basketball player to have his name on a specific sport specific wheelchair, the Quickie All Court, which has becomethe chair of choice for many top players around the world such as Canada's Patrick Anderson, Holland's Gert Jan van der Linden and the United states' 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 extension, I wouldn't do the things that I can do."

    While athletes like Henk MaCkenzie, a basketball player from the Netherlands were experimenting with odd notions like camber inEurope 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, multisport athletes like himself who knewthere 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 is 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 the Paralympic track 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., is 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 colorand is now everywhere.

    Before Hamilton, the first athlete to take their own innovations to a broader market as a business was Jeff Minnebrakerin 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. Mninnebraker'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, thoughthat 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 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 stillpretty 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 onewheel 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 meetthose 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 theaddition 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 aluminumto 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 weneed to meet the athletes' needs with far less time required. Thedevelopment of this in our everyday chairs has allowed us to bringit 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 velocityto serves with the agile mobility prerequisite to moving about thecourt. 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 loose 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 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 44minutes slower.

    While durability is important, such as in the rough and tumble physicality of the men's 1500 meter semifinal races run here in Athens, the need for speed is the most critical element.

    That's why an elite athlete such as Great Britain's Tanni Grey-Thompson 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 racerit was a pretty sexy thing actually."

    For young athletes like Alhassane Balde of Germany or Tatyana McFadden from the United States, they are fortunate enough to begin their careers in a time when the equipment won't hold them back. What they do with it is up to them.

    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. Enditem