History of Paralympic Games

In 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttmann organized a sports competition involving World War II veterans with a spinal cord injury in Stoke Mandeville, England. Four years later, competitors from the Netherlands joined the games and an international movement was born. Olympic style games for athletes with a disability were organized for the first time in Rome in 1960, now called Paralympics. In Toronto in 1976, other disability groups were added and the idea of merging together different disability groups for international sport competitions was born. In the same year, the first Paralympic Winter Games took place in Sweden.

Today, the Paralympics are elite sport events for athletes from six different disability groups. They emphasize, however, the participants' athletic achievements rather than their disability. The movement has grown dramatically since its first days. The number of athletes participating in Summer Paralympic Games has increased from 400 athletes in Rome in 1960 to 3843 in Sydney in 2000. In Athens 2004, a record number of 136 countries participated at the Paralympics, making this the largest Games in Paralympic history.

The Paralympic Games have always been held in the same year as the Olympic Games. Since the Seoul 1988 Paralympic Games and the Albertville 1992 Winter Paralympic Games they have also taken place at the same venues as the Olympics. On 19 June 2001, an agreement was signed between IOC and IPC securing this practice for the future. From the 2012 bid process onwards, the host city chosen to host the Olympic Games will be obliged to also host the Paralympics.

The Italian city of Torino will host the next 2006 Paralympic Winter Games, whereas the Summer Paralympics 2008 will be in Beijing, China. Vancouver will host the Winter Paralympics in 2010.

Classification

This is the method by which athletes are grouped in their sport and in their events to ensure that they compete fairly against other athletes with a similar degree of disability. This was originally based on medical opinion only but is now evaluated on an athlete’s functional ability. In the past, Paralympic competition has been organised within disability groups, e.g. amputees competing against amputees and spinal cord injured competing against other spinal cord injured - all classified (within their disability groups) according to the severity of their disability.

In Barcelona, athletes from all the locomotor disability groups competed - for the first time - against each other, with classes of competitions based on functional ability rather than clinical disability. The visually impaired will continue to compete separately in three classes, B1 blind, B2 partially sighted and B3 visually impaired. To be considered eligible for the Games, athletes with a learning disability must have medical confirmation that their IQ rating is 75 or less and they too compete only against athletes in their own disability group. Most competitors will have been classified many times before they even reach a Paralympic venue, and several days are set aside at the beginning of each Paralympics for further classification checks by an international panel of experienced classifiers. These efforts endeavour to create a level playing field.