Paralympic Games

An international sporting competition for athletes with disabilities, held every four years since 1948 in ‘parallel’ with the Olympic Games. The Games were the creation of Dr Ludwig Guttmann, neurologist at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire, England, as an extension of his rehabilitation programme for World War II veterans with spinal injuries.

Guttmann believed that sport and especially competitive sport could greatly help the disabled to lead fuller lives, not least by instilling greater self-respect among a group of people who had previously been thought of as hopeless cripples. The first games, a competition between hospitals and sports clubs, took place at Stoke Mandeville on the opening day of the 1948 London Olympic Games. Thereafter they increased in size and scope, and at Rome 1960, the International Stoke Mandeville Games, as they had become known, attracted 400 athletes from 23 countries. Until 1972 the games were limited to wheelchair-bound athletes, but 1976 events for amputees and the blind were introduced, and since then the games have gradually been expanded to include athletes with other disabilities, from cerebral palsy to learning difficulties. The 1988 games at Seoul were the first truly ‘parallel’ games, with several events taking place at the Olympic stadium, and also the first both to receive extensive media attention and to attract large crowds. At Sydney 2000 3,824 athletes from 122 countries competed in sports ranging from athletics, swimming, basketball, and archery to specially-devised games such as goalball for the blind.

While earlier athletes were classified in their events according to a medical assessment of their disability, more recently they have classed according to their functional ability or potential, so that sports such as swimming have an increasing number of mixed-disability events.