One of the most absurd questions that sport has ever come up with has been resolved. We have established that a man with no legs doesn’t really have a sneaky advantage in a running race against people with the normal allocation of legs. Oscar Pistorius has been cleared to run in the Olympic Games, and anyone with sporting, or for that matter human, blood in his veins wishes him all the best.

Meanwhile, Natalie du Toit, another South African, has qualified for the Olympic open water swim, despite being half a leg short of the full complement. This, again, is a wonderfully cheering story: they are both remarkable people and their tales are inspirational.

But a sense of unease remains. Shouldn’t they both be winning gold in the Paralympics rather than merely taking part in the able-bodied Games? Do their stories tell us that it is all right to be disabled? Or, on the contrary, that it is a stigma to avoid at all costs? What does it mean, this wild attempt of a double-amputee to be considered an honorary able-bodied athlete?

There are some who believe that the achievements of this pair in some way undermine the Paralympics. There should be a hard and fast line, and perfect physical specimens go the Olympics while the others who have no such luck go to the Paralympics.

But me, I like this blurring of distinctions. I like the idea that lines cannot be hard, cannot be fast. I like the idea of a continuum; I like the breaking down of neat compartments. Our notions of race and religion and sexual orientations have all taken a buffeting in the past half-century and we have discovered time and again that the drawing of lines is simply unsustainable.

This is just one more boundary that is dissolving, one more ghetto that is breaking up. In a more inclusive society, the physically and mentally disadvantaged now play a greater and far more central part. Pistorius’s victory is a victory for us all because it says that the idea of disadvantage doesn’t really mean all that much. We’re all humans, that’s all.