Paris 2024 Paralympics

Here’s a quick guide to the 17th Paralympic Games in Paris.

Since the first games for disabled athletes in 1948 to the first official Paralympics in Rome in 1960 to today’s games, the size and the exposure of the games has increased enormously.

In Rome, 400 athletes from 23 countries participated in eight sports. Since then, they have taken place just after each Olympics. This year, around 4,400 athletes from more than 168 delegations, including the refugee team,  will compete in 22 different sports. Some are shared with the Olympics, like athletics, basketball or swimming. Some of these are only played by certain categories of athletes. For example, fencing, tennis and basketball are only played by wheelchair athletes, while judo is only played by athletes with sight impairment.

 

The Paralympics began in Stoke Mandeville, England, in 1948. Dr Ludwig Guttmann was working with World War 2 veterans who had spinal injuries. He used sport as part of their rehabilitation. In 1948, he organised a competition for disabled athletes at the same time as the Olympic Games in London.

There are also four sports unique to the Paralympics: Boccia (a sort of wheelchair “boules”); goalball (a goal-scoring game for vision-impaired athletes); powerlifting (weightlifting from a horizontal position) and wheelchair rugby, which despite its name in fact combines elements of basketball and ice hockey with rugby.

For the sports that are multi-disability, there is a complex system of classification to ensure that participants compete against people with similar capacities, not necessarily the same disability. This replaced a system where, for example, leg amputees swam against leg amputees.

Elite performance is what the Paralympics is all about these days, and often parathletes perform on a par with able-bodied ones. The fastest Paralympic record for men’s 100 m in athletics is 10s37 compared to 9s58  for the Olympic one.

With each new Olympiad, Paralympic sports gain in visibility and mainstream acceptance. In London in 2012, the British public really took the parathletes to their hearts, and attendance at events and TV audiences beat all records. This year the organisers responded to requests from the athletes for more inclusion by holding the opening ceremony and several events in the heart of the city. But as Paris 2024 organiser Tony Estanguet and Paralympic’s chai Andrew Parsons pointed out in their opening speeches, the most important legacy of the Paralympic Games will be if the 15 per cent of the world population who live with disabilities gain better ac as to sport but also to all the other aspects of society such as work, education, transport and entertainment, which are often limited or closed to them.