At the Bionic Olympics, athletes and engineers make miracles

THE MORNING OF the powered exoskeleton finals at the 2016 Cybathlon opened on a less-than-promising note.

Mark Daniel, a 26-year-old former welder who’d been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident at 18, was rushing down a ramp at the venue when his wheelchair caught on a post. He took a hard tumble out of his chair and on to the pavement. This alarmed his teammates, a group of six engineers and technicians from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. They’d been working 12-hour days for months, designing, assembling, and refining the robotic exoskeleton suit for which Daniel served as the lone pilot. They had no Plan B. Given the public and media spotlight focused on the Cybathlon, careers could rise or fall depending on Daniel’s performance.

All week in Zurich, Switzerland, it had been ‘Go slow, Mark. Take it easy, Mark’. He understood the concern, but was determined to make the most of his first trip abroad. Before this, the Floridian hadn’t done much travelling beyond Tallahassee.

On their first night in town, before anybody went to bed, Daniel’s teammates had unpacked and assembled the exoskeleton – 30-plus kilograms of aluminium-alloy frame, compact DC motors, sophisticated software, and lithium-battery-powered actuators. Daniel donned the suit, and the engineers asked him to walk down the hallway to test it. Instead, he made a beeline for the elevator, rode down to the lobby, and high-stepped through the bar. The next day, in his wheelchair, Daniel rolled out to see the city.

Now, after the tumble at the venue, team members fluttered around him nervously, but he was fine, he was okay, and now it was time. Daniel was in the arena, lining up for the final. The six-challenge, 40-metre-long courses were laid out in adjacent paths, allowing spectators to follow the action. His opponent was a man from Germany piloting a commercially made exoskeleton he’d used for years; Daniel had trained on the IHMC device for just eight weeks.

Organised and hosted by ETH Zürich, an elite Swiss science and technology university, the Cybathlon showcases individuals with significant physical disabilities competing in races that simulate everyday tasks. It shines a spotlight on the high-tech prosthetic devices designed by the world’s leading research groups that enable them to compete.

Each event presents a fascinating dance between human and machine: the energy of the cyclists blasting around the track in the functional electrical stimulation event; the intricate play of contestants buttering slices of bread in the powered arm prosthesis competition; the bull-rush charge of the powered wheelchair race.

But the powered exoskeleton race, a combined athletic and engineering spectacle in which people who are paralysed are empowered to walk, recalls the Biblical miracle at the pool of Bethesda. Strapped