DURING the coming weeks, much ink will be spilled on the efforts of competitors attempting to qualify for the European championships in Budapest and the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. Backed by the best sports science and medicine which the lottery can buy, aspirations are already rising - probably excessively.

Yet competitors with disabilities will shortly discover whether they have succeeded in qualify-ing for their world championships in Birmingham in August. It may surprise you to learn that the wheelchair racers' sports science support programme has been suspended for several months.

Disabled athletes are as committed as their abled counterparts, and it seems unreasonable that they should be doubly handicapped, but David McCrae, Teamsport Scotland's co-ordinator for disabled sport, says support for such competitors will be fundamental at the Scottish Institute of Sport which will soon be in place.

Technology of artificial limbs is so advanced that completely different angles are required for different sports, and prosthetics specialist resources will be part of the SIS responsibility.

At the Royal Mail Scottish Championships for People with a Disability at Grangemouth today, leading competitors will qualify for the British championships next weekend, following which the world team will be chosen.

Already in the training squad for the world event is Carluke's Karen Lewis, whose disability has recently been reclassified, taking her out of the category dominated by the Welsh Paralympic gold medallist Tanni Grey. Lewis's best performances would have won medals in the Atlanta Paralympics had she been reclassified earlier.

A member of Glasgow Red Star, and helped by coach Ian Mirfin, she has managed to bridge the sports science gap. She leaves a week on Monday for six weeks at the University of Illinois, where wheelchair sports science is at its most advanced, to train under guru Marti Morse.

On a treadmill, it is possible to do the world's leading marathon courses (faithfully replicating the gradient, with the incline varied appropriately) without leaving the laboratory.

Cameras help analyse optimum positions, and video screens show the actual route, or superimpose film of the world's leading competitors, allowing athletes to mimic the wheel stroke-rate of the likes of Heinz Frei, the 38-year-old world record-breaking Swiss who won the London Marathon last month. His technique was analysed at Illinois, where they christened him the Energiser Bunney, stunned that he could produce a stroke-rate of 110 per minute.

Yet there is a sinister side to the pursuit of disabled excellence. This column has previously revealed how some wheelchair racers resort to amputation of paralysed limbs to obtain a more beneficial power-to-weight ratio. A 10-stone athlete paralysed from the waist down gains a significant advantage by becoming a lighter athlete with no legs.

However, there is another practice, far more radical, indetectable, and potentially life-threatening. Wheelchair athletes refer to it as boosting. Doctors call it autonomic disreflexia. Its effectiveness depends on the fact that paralysis from a lesion high in the spinal column means there is total loss of sensation from the chest down.

By inflicting injury or stress which they cannot feel, disreflexia is induced. Laboratory tests on willing guinea pigs have shown this can enhance oxygen uptake by up to 20%, and performance by as much as 10%. However it can cause blood pressure to rise to twice the level normally experienced during exercise.

Some athletes will actually fracture their legs or toes to achieve this effect. Twisting of the scrotum, and sitting on it, or blocking the catheter from which they normally urinate during races, causing the bladder to swell, are other methods of bringing on the condition.

Though there do not appear to have been any fatalities from the practice, strokes and heart attacks have been recorded when the condition has occurred naturally. It is regarded as a medical emergency. The Paralympics view boosting as a form of doping, and it is banned.

The rewards in wheelchair sport do not match those for abled track and field athletes, but they are still worth thousands of pounds a year, and a high profile brings endorsement contracts, even if they do not match those of the Olympic elite.

McCrae, an amputee volleyball international, is chairman of the British Paralympic athletes' committee. ''I haven't personally witnessed boosting, but it is a common topic among competitors. It is not being talked about if it is not going on.''