"Have you heard the name Oscar Pistorius?" With an hour to go before the first event of Saturday night's programme, the Olympic stadium was only half full when the announcer posed the question, but a massive roar went up. Until recently, apart from such local heroes as Tanni Grey-Thompson and Ellie Simmonds, the South African has been the only disabled athlete known to the majority of the British public, a metaphorical as well as – in the opening ceremony on Friday night – a literal standard-bearer.
The 2012 Paralympic Games got its first sight of him last night when he won the last of three heats of the T43/44 200m for single and double amputees, setting a world record in the process. This is one of a trio of events – the others are the 100m and the 400m – in which he is defending the titles he won in Beijing four years ago.
Three weeks ago he made the second of his two historic appearances in the Olympic Games, he and three fellow South Africans coming last in the final of the 4x400m relay. They had been allowed into the medal race, taking their place in a ninth lane, after the judges ruled that they had been impeded during the heat by a member of the Kenyan quartet.
A few days earlier, in the individual 400m, he finished second in his heat but came last in the semi-final, although there was an unforgettably touching moment when Kirani James, the 19-year-old phenomenon from Grenada who would go on to win the gold medal, removed the race number from his vest and asked Pistorius to swap with him.
If that is the sort of esteem in which the 25-year-old from Johannesburg is held by his fellow athletes, then those of us who harbour reservations about the wisdom of allowing him to compete alongside able-bodied athletes had better shut up. There may still be validity in the belief that, while Pistorius's carbon-fibre blades have been deemed to confer no special advantage, that may not be true of a more highly developed set attached to some future athlete. But his value as a symbol, his contribution to the spread of a more enlightened attitude to physical disability, is so far beyond dispute as to render the debate redundant.
For now, that is, and it was certainly not without interest and possibly significance that of the three 200m heats, which were contested by 13 T44 (single amputee) and five T43 (double amputee) athletes, each was won by a runner with two carbon-fibre legs: the first being Alan Oliveira of Brazil, who set a new world record of 21.88 sec, followed in the second race by Blake Leeper of the United States and in the third by Pistorius, who was given the sort of reception normally accorded to British athletes before beating Oliveira's time as he romped away from the field to finish in 21.30 seconds. They will meet in tonight's final.
He is not the only Paralympic sprinter to have competed at a major championship alongside able-bodied athletes. Last night Jason Smyth, a partially sighted 25-year-old from County Londonderry, also set a new world record while winning the final of the T13 100m for athletes with significant visual impairment, having appeared in the world championships in Daegu, South Korea last year.
Smyth, whose vision was affected during childhood by a degenerative condition known as Stargardt disease, has a personal best time of 10.22 sec, four 100ths of a second outside the qualifying time for the London Olympics. He is the reigning T13 champion at 100m and 200m and has spent much of the past three years training in Florida alongside Tyson Gay, the second fastest man of all time. In Friday's heats he lowered his own Paralympic world record to 10.54 – a third of a second slower than his personal best, but that was achieved in a competition with able-bodied runners, and Paralympic records must be set during a meeting licensed by the governing body. Last night he reduced it again, this time to 10.46 as he crossed the line more than half a second ahead of the remainder of the field, who appeared to be in a different race.
Smyth remains intent on running in the Olympics, and is focusing his ambitions on the 2016 Games in Rio. "The reality is that Olympic sport is at a higher level and some of us are stuck in the older ways," he says. "We're trying to make that great leap forward."
No one knows where all this will lead, and there are likely to be more debates to come in the post-Pistorius era. But the South African and his fellow athletes are teaching us all lessons.
