The Paralympic Games Explained

Second Edition

Ian Brittain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317404149
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Paralympic Games is the second largest multi-sport festival on earth and an event which poses profound and challenging questions about the nature of sport, disability and society. The Paralympic Games Explained is the first complete introduction to the Paralympic phenomenon, exploring every key aspect and issue, from the history and development of the Paralympic movement to the economic and social impact of the contemporary Games.

Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, it includes new material on hosting and legacy, Vancouver 2010 to Rio 2016, sport for development, and case studies of an additional ten Paralympic nations. Drawing on a range of international examples, it discusses key issues such as:

• how societal attitudes influence disability sport

• the governance of Paralympic and elite disability sport

• the relationship between the Paralympics and the Olympics

• drugs and technology in disability sport

• classification in disability sport.

Containing useful features including review questions, study activities, web links and guides to further reading throughout, The Paralympic Games Explained is the most accessible and comprehensive guide to the Paralympics currently available. It is essential reading for all students with an interest in disability sport, sporting mega-events, the politics of sport, or disability in society.

1 The history and development of the Paralympic Games

Chapter aims

• To outline the history and development of the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games.

• To explain the development and various meanings of the term ‘Paralympic’.

• To outline the various impairment groupings that make up the Paralympic Movement.

Before proceeding with this chapter it is important to point out that the academic study of the history of the Paralympic Games is still in its infancy, especially compared to the historical study of events such as the Olympic Games. It is only in the last ten years that any serious attempts have been made to document their history and development. Also, unlike the Olympic Games, there is still no single archival or library source that adequately documents the subject. This problem has been further compounded by the fact that record keeping for these Games, especially prior to 1988, was quite basic, with much material connected to these early Games either simply lost, thrown out or in the case of the very first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960, destroyed in a fire. Many of the reasons for this lack of record keeping will become clear throughout the text, but the main reasons appear to be that no one involved in these early Games believed that the Paralympic Games would ever reach a size or importance that would make them worthy of academic historical documentation and study and that the Games were organised on shoe-string budgets by volunteers who had little or no time to ensure the Games were adequately documented (Brittain et al., 2013). The area in which this has had the greatest impact has been in arriving at accurate figures for athlete participation numbers at the early Games. Even where ‘full’ results are available, often in the case of team events and relays, only the country name is given rather than the names of the individual team members, making it impossible to come up with accurate figures for participating athletes either by country or gender. There is, however, now general agreement regarding the number of participating nations at each Games and the facts and figures that appear in this chapter are the result of over ten years of research in this area by the author.

Disability sport prior to the 1940s

Sainsbury (1998) cites several examples of sports and leisure clubs for the disabled in the early part of the twentieth century, including the British Society of One-Armed Golfers (1932) and the ‘Disabled Drivers’ Motor Club (1922). Indeed the first international organisation responsible for a particular impairment group and its involvement in sport – Comité International des Sports des Sourds (CISS) – was set up by a deaf Frenchman, E. Rubens-Alcais, in 1924 with the support of six national sports federations for the deaf. In August 1924 the first International Silent Games was held in Paris with athletes from nine countries in attendance (DePauw and Gavron, 2005). Now called the Deaflympics there are summer and winter versions which occur in the year following their Olympic and Paralympic counterparts.

The impact of World War II on disability sport

Prior to World War II, the vast majority of those with spinal cord injuries died within three years following their injury (Legg et al., 2002). Indeed, Ludwig Guttmann, the universally accepted founder of the modern day Paralympic movement, whilst a doctor in 1930s Germany encountered on a ward round a coal miner with a broken back. Guttmann was shocked to learn from the consultant that such cases were a waste of time as he would be dead within two weeks (Craven, 2006). This was usually from sepsis of the blood or kidney failure or both. However, after World War II sulfa drugs made spinal cord injury survivable (Brandmeyer and McBee, 1986). The other major issue for individuals with spinal injuries was the major depression caused by societal attitudes to them, which, at the time, automatically assigned them to the scrapheap of life as useless and worthless individuals.

Ludwig Guttmann was a German-Jewish neurologist who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1939 and eventually settled in Oxford where he found work at Oxford University. In September 1943 the British Government commissioned Guttmann as the Director of the National Spinal Injuries Unit at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital, Stoke Mandeville, Aylesbury (Lomi et al., 2004). This was mainly to take care of the numerous soldiers and civilians suffering from spinal injuries as a result of the war. Guttmann accepted under the condition that he would be totally independent and that he could apply his philosophy as far as the whole approach to the treatment of those patients was concerned, although many of his colleagues were apparently surprised by his enthusiasm for what they perceived as an utterly daunting task. Apparently, they could not understand how Guttmann could leave Oxford University to be ‘engulfed in the hopeless and depressing task of looking after traumatic spinal paraplegics’ (Goodman, 1986).

Prior to World War II there is little evidence of organised efforts to develop or promote sport for individuals with disabling conditions, especially those with spinal injuries who were considered to have no hope of surviving their injuries. Following the war, however, medical authorities were prompted to re-evaluate traditional methods of rehabilitation which were not satisfactorily responding to the medical and psychological needs of the large number of soldiers disabled in combat (Steadward, 1992). According to McCann (1996), Guttmann recognised the physiological and psychological values of sport in the rehabilitation of paraplegic hospital inpatients and so it was that sport was introduced as part of the total rehabilitation programme for patients in the spinal unit. The aim was not only to give hope and a sense of self-worth to the patients, but to change the attitudes of society towards the spinally injured by demonstrating to them that they could not only continue to be useful members of society, but could take part in activities and complete tasks most of the non-disabled society would struggle with (Anderson, 2003).

According to Guttmann (1952) they started modestly and cautiously with darts, snooker, punch-ball and skittles. Sometime later, apparently after Dr Guttmann and his remedial gymnast, Quartermaster ‘Q’ Hill had ‘waged furious battle’ in an empty ward to test it, the sport of wheelchair polo was introduced. This was perceived a short time later, however, as too rough for all concerned and was replaced by wheelchair netball (Scruton, 1964). This later became what we now know as wheelchair basketball. The next sport to be introduced into the programme at Stoke Mandeville was to play a key role in all areas of Dr Guttmann’s rehabilitation plans. That sport was archery. According to Guttmann archery was of immense value in strengthening, in a very natural way, just those muscles of the upper limbs, shoulders and trunk, on which the paraplegic’s well-balanced, upright position depends (Guttmann, 1952). However, it was far more than just that. It was one of the very few sports that, once proficient, paraplegics could compete on equal terms with their non-disabled counterparts. This led to visits of teams from Stoke Mandeville to a number of non-disabled archery clubs in later years, which were very helpful in breaking down the barriers between the public and the paraplegics. It also meant that once discharged from hospital the paraplegic had an access to society through their local archery club (Guttmann, 1952). According to Guttmann these experiments were the beginning of a systematic development of competitive sport for the paralysed as an essential part of their medical rehabilitation and social re-integration in the community of a country like Great Britain where sport in one form or another plays such an essential part in the life of so many people (Guttmann, 1976).

An inauspicious beginning to a worldwide phenomenon

For an event that would later go on to become the largest ever sporting event for people with disabilities and the second largest multi-sport event on the planet after the Olympic Games, the event now known globally as the Paralympic Games had a rather inauspicious beginning. It began life as an archery demonstration between two teams of paraplegics from the Ministry of Pensions Hospital at Stoke Mandeville and the Star and Garter Home for Injured War Veterans at Richmond in Surrey. It was held in conjunction with the presentation of a specially adapted bus to the patients of Stoke Mandeville by the British Legion and London Transport. Perhaps more auspicious was the date chosen for the handover of the bus and the archery demonstration, Thursday, 29 July 1948, the exact same day as the opening ceremony for the Games of the Fourteenth Olympiad at Wembley in London less than thirty-five miles away. It is difficult to assess whether this initial link to the Olympic Games was a deliberate one, or just coincidence, but it was a link that Guttmann himself would cultivate very overtly over the following years and decades. Guttmann later stated that the event was an experiment as a public performance, but also a demonstration to society that sport was not just the domain of the non-disabled (Guttmann, 1952). The aim of the bus was not only to allow patients to travel around the country to various activities and events, but also to allow them to get back out into the community and enter more into the life of the town. The bus would also be used to take competitors to many more archery competitions over the coming years against teams of both disabled and non-disabled archers.

Dr Guttmann’s ‘Grand Festival of Paraplegic Sport’, as the second incarnation of the Games were described, were held on Wednesday, 27 July 1949. Building upon much hard work done by Dr Guttmann, his staff and the impact of various Stoke Mandeville patients moving to other spinal units around the country and taking their new found enthusiasm for sport with them the number of spinal units entered rose to six (The Cord, 1949). A grand total of thirty-seven individuals took part in these Games and with the exception of the archers from the Polish Hospital at Penley every competitor had, at some time, been a patient of Dr Guttmann. In addition to a repeat of the previous year’s archery competition, ‘net-ball’ was added to the programme for these Games. This was a kind of hybrid of netball and basketball played in wheelchairs and using netball posts for goals.

The next three years saw competitor numbers at the Games continue to grow as more and more spinal units from around the country began to enter teams. Guttmann, however, had far grander plans and continued with the hope that he could move the Games on to an international footing. One local paper claimed this had moved a step closer in 1951 with representation of competitors with a variety of nationalities including a Frenchman, an Australian, some Poles and a Southern Rhodesian. With the exception of the Poles, who were residents of the Polish hospital at Penley, the others were all individual patients resident at British Spinal Units. The first step to Guttmann’s dream was to occur the very next year, 1952, when a team of four paraplegics from the Military Rehabilitation Centre, Aardenburg, near Doorn in the Netherlands became the first truly international competitors at the Games. Over the next four years the international nature of the Games rose dramatically so that in 1956 there were eighteen nations represented at the Games and a total of twenty-one different nations had competed since 1952 (Scruton, 1956).

Table 1.1 A chronology of the early Stoke Mandeville Games (1948–1959)

Date	Teams	Competitors	Sports	New sport
Thurs 29 July 1948	2^*	16	1	Archery
Weds 29 July 1949	6^*	37	2	‘Netball’
Weds 27 July 1950	10^*	61	3	Javelin
Sat 28 July 1951	11^*	126	4	Snooker
Sat 26 July, 1952	2	130	5	Table tennis
Sat 8 August 1953	6	200	6	Swimming
Sat 31 July 1954	14	250	7	Dartchery
Fri and Sat 29–30 July 1955	18	280	8	Fencing, basketball replaced netball
Fri and Sat 27–28 July 1956	18	300	8	–
Fri and Sat 26–27 July 1957	24	360	9	Shot putt
Thurs–Sat 24–26 July 1958	21	350	10	Throwing th...