PARALYMPICS

The Paralympics is a mega sports event for athletes with a wide range of disabilities, organised by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). The disabilities covered include impaired muscle power (for example paraplegia and quadriplegia, muscular dystrophy, post-polio syndrome and spina bifida), impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency (such as amputation or dysmelia), leg-length difference, short stature, hypertonia, ataxia, athetosis, vision impairment and intellectual impairment. Each disability is then broken down into classifications that vary from sport to sport.

The word Paralympics comes from the Greek para, meaning 'beside' or 'alongside', joined to 'Olympic' — so it describes an international competition held parallel to, and alongside, the Olympic Games. Since the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, the Winter and Summer Paralympic Games have been held almost immediately after the respective Olympic Games, in the same host cities and venues, under an agreement between the IPC and the IOC.

Formation of the IPC

Several organisations once worked separately for different disability groups, so there was a need to bring every impairment under a single umbrella. The International Stoke Mandeville Games Federation (ISMGF) was founded after the 1952 Games and held what are now recognised as the first Paralympic Games in Italy in 1960. The International Sport Organisation for the Disabled (ISOD) was formed in 1964 for athletes who could not take part in the Stoke Mandeville Games. These bodies, together with the Cerebral Palsy International Sports and Recreation Association (CPISRA, 1978) and the International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA, 1980), joined to form the International Co-ordinating Committee Sports for the Disabled in the World (ICC) in 1982. The International Sports Federation for Persons with an Intellectual Disability (INAS-FID) joined in 1986. This combination finally led to the formation of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) on 22 September 1989 at Dusseldorf, Germany, as the global governing body of the Paralympic movement.

The vision of the IPC is 'to enable Para athletes to achieve sporting excellence and to inspire and excite the world.' The Paralympic anthem is Hymne de l'Avenir ('Anthem of the Future'), composed by Thierry Darnis and adopted as the official anthem of the IPC in March 1996.

Did you know? For the Tokyo 2020 Games there were 22 summer Paralympic sports, including archery and athletics (both since 1960), boccia, para-cycling and powerlifting (since 1984), goalball (1980), wheelchair basketball, wheelchair fencing, swimming and table tennis (1960), wheelchair tennis (1992), wheelchair rugby (2000), the newer para-badminton and para-taekwondo (2020), and 5-a-side football for the vision-impaired (2004).

Categories

A major challenge for the organisers of para-sport is that competition can become one-sided and predictable, with the least impaired athlete always winning. To prevent this, para-athletes are placed in sport classes according to their impairment, so that winning is decided by skill, fitness, power, endurance, tactical ability and mental focus rather than by the degree of disability. When an athlete begins to compete she or he is allocated a class, which may be reviewed over the course of a career.

The purpose of the classification criteria is twofold:

• to define the impairment group in which an athlete can compete in each sport; and
• to group athletes into classes according to how far their impairment limits activity in that particular sport.

The IPC has established ten eligible impairment types, grouped under physical, visual and intellectual impairment, and these apply to both the Summer and the Winter Paralympics (though not every sport caters for every category).

1. Physical Impairment — there are eight different types:

• Impaired muscle power — the force produced by muscles (of one limb, one side of the body or the lower half of the body) is reduced, e.g. spinal-cord injury, spina bifida, post-polio syndrome.
• Impaired passive range of movement — movement in one or more joints is permanently reduced; acute conditions such as arthritis are not included.
• Loss of limb or limb deficiency — the total or partial absence of bones or joints through illness, trauma or a congenital condition, e.g. amputation, dysmelia.
• Leg-length difference — significant shortening of the bone in one leg because of a congenital condition or trauma.
• Short stature — reduced standing height caused by a musculo-skeletal deficit of the bones or cartilage of the legs, arms and trunk, e.g. achondroplasia, growth-hormone deficiency, osteogenesis imperfecta.
• Hypertonia — an abnormal increase in muscle tension and a reduced ability of the muscle to stretch, often from damage to the central nervous system, e.g. cerebral palsy.
• Ataxia — a lack of coordination of muscle movements, e.g. cerebral palsy, Friedreich's ataxia, multiple sclerosis. …