Exclusive video: Watch the fastest thing on no legs break the 100m record

Graphic: How the Cheetah blades measure up

Eleven floors up, at the Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopaedics at the German Sports University in Cologne, Oscar Pistorius is watching as his legs are pressed in a mechanical vice. A graph appears on the screen next to it, recording the force required for each degree of flex. Pistorius yawns and wanders off to text his friends about his 21st birthday on Thursday. He can do that. He has more than one pair of legs.

We walk next door, to a room with lots of little cages with wheels in them, stacked neatly in the corner. They are the kind of cages in which scientists keep mice. Pistorius throws out and lands one of his favourite and increasingly powerful left jabs on my shoulder (he has been in the gym a lot). He looks at me and grins and I know what he is thinking: “Is he just a giant mouse for experiments?”

Professor Peter Brüggemann, the head of the institute, who is charged with leading the first tests to analyse the effectiveness of the “Cheetah” blades that Pistorius uses compared with the human lower limb, is an avuncular presence. But, as Pistorius says after the testing, “he’s holding my career in his hands.”

That is only partly right. Unfortunately, politics will have a big say, as well. Pistorius and the IAAF, the world governing body, will be told privately by the end of this month whether the athlete can compete in IAAF-recognised able-bodied events and in the Olympic Games, but it will be for the IAAF council to make the decision public, probably by early in the new year. “We will only produce the data, the decisions are for the IAAF,” Brüggemann said.

After so much acrimony between the IAAF and Pistorius this year – when first the IAAF said that runners with technical aids could not compete in able-bodied races, only for Pistorius to lobby against the decision and be given leave to have tests to prove that the aids were fair – the trip to Cologne represented sanity, humanity and the opportunity to leave a legacy of understanding for the rest of the world.

Pistorius, known as “Bladerunner” because he runs on two carbon-fibre J-shaped legs, has just had the greatest test, or tests, of his life. He spent two intensive days in Cologne alongside six able-bodied athletes of a similar standard to him. The six are capable of running 400 metres in about Pistorius’s personal best of 46.34sec, which was recorded in the heats of the South African National Championships, an able-bodied race, in March.

Brüggemann’s tests were instigated and paid for by the IAAF at a cost of €30,000 (about £21,000) after they had collected evidence in July in Italy that suggested that he was running in a significantly different way to able-bodied runners. Its contention was that Pistorius is the only 400 metres runner in history to run his second 200 metres faster than his first. Pistorius had long been calling for independent tests.

Abled, disabled or too abled? That is what the IAAF is trying to decide. But it is already looking past Pistorius to a possible bionic future of techno-doping and deliberate amputations to increase speed, of 400 metres “cyborgs” capable of breaking 40sec.

The tests, carried out with a dozen assistants, were witnessed by three IAAF representatives – Dr Elio Locatelli, a director of the governing body, Imre Matharazi, a technical manager, and Frederic Sánchez, a cameraman – and two representatives from Pistorius’s camp – Peet van Zyl, his agent, and Knut Lechler, a director of Ossur, the company that produces his prosthetics.

It was my privilege to be present, permitted by both parties, to create a document of record of the tests, while producing a film on Pistorius’s life. For all involved there was a sense that this was a moment in history. They are the first tests of their kind because never before has an amputee run 400 metres anywhere near as fast as Pistorius.

On the first morning, Pistorius ran a maximum-effort 400 metres on an outdoor track, wearing a mask that measures oxygen and carbon dioxide during inhalation and exhalation, to test aerobic capacity. If Pistorius did not look like a man from the future on the track before, the mask completed the picture. His blood lactate level was measured and he fell ill, such had been his exertion.

At 5pm came the most important test, the indoor sprints over four pressure plates on a 100-metre track, with 12 infrared motion-controlled cameras and four high-speed cameras. Pistorius ran four sprints over 80 metres and one over about 40 metres before a painful knee forced him to stop.

Reflective nodules were placed along Pistorius’s upper legs and blades and similarly on the other athletes’ legs. The infrared cameras captured these from all sides. The four high-speed cameras at the side produced a slow-motion image of the blade hitting the pressure plate.

From these two sets of data, all the forces can be compared between the able-bodied athletes’ leg and the Cheetah blades (see graphic). Ossur contends that Pistorius’s legs give him only between 60 and 70 per cent of the energy return of the natural lower limb.

For Pistorius, who was born without fibulae and had his legs amputated when he was 11 months old, it is his life and livelihood. “I don’t believe they [the tests] will go against me,” he says. “Even if they do I’ll get a second opinion. The same legs, the same shape, the same methods, made by the same company, have been available and used by other sprinters and no one has got close to my times. I don’t think there has been a negative agenda here. I think these tests have been very professional. Obviously, I have had differences with the IAAF, but I think now that everyone just wants to know the truth.”

How fast is Pistorius? He is running more than two seconds slower than the best 400 metres runners in the world. He finished second in the South African National Championships final in 46.56sec, a time that would have earned him sixth place in the UK Championships in Manchester in July. He would like to compete in the Olympics in Beijing next year, if he can run the 400 metres qualifying time of 45.50sec, but he has always said that he will compete in the Paralympics as well. He has smashed all the Paralympic world records for 100, 200 and 400 metres.

Having met Pistorius when he was a 17-year-old, who came from nowhere to star at the Athens Paralympics in 2004, and got to know him since, it is difficult to remain neutral. Whatever the results of the tests, he is an extraordinary person.

The IAAF is worried about creating precedents, but then the International Cricket Council changed the rules on illegal bowling to accommodate the mechanically unique arm of Muttiah Muralitharan, the Sri Lanka spin bowler, after putting him through similar testing. It is not the same, but individual exceptions can be made.

In years to come, people will look back at these biomechanical tests as the blurring of what we mean by able-bodied and disabled. By then, Pistorius’s silhouette may well have become one of the iconic images in all of sport.

— The documentary on Oscar Pistorius, made with October Films, will be aired on Five in January.

Born to run: the Pistorius story

— Oscar Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on November 22, 1986, without a fibula in either leg

— After getting the opinions of 12 surgeons, his parents, Sheila and Henke, decided to amputate both legs halfway between the knee and ankle when he was 11 months old

— When Pistorius was 15, his mother died after having an allergic reaction to medication

— Pistorius had never competed in athletics before a serious knee injury during a tackle in a rugby game in 2003 left him needing to run to rehabilitate

— By 2004, his talent was obvious and he was selected for the South Africa team for the Athens Paralympics

— After only eight months running competitively on proper “blades”, he became the star of the Games aged only 17, winning gold in the 200 metres and bronze in the 100 metres

— The next year, he finished sixth in the able-bodied 400 metres at the South African National Championships In March 2007, he took second place in the same race and looked ready to break on to the world stage in able-bodied races

— After his way was initially blocked, he was allowed to run in his first international able-bodied events in Rome and Sheffield and the IAAF agreed to pay for tests in Cologne to establish the blades’ legality

— Pistorius lives outside Pretoria and trains and studies at the city’s university