The expansion of the international sports infrastructure forms part of the social history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This expansion has been linked by a succession of authors to a series of technological revolutions in transport, communications and industrial production, as well as attendant social and political changes (Guttmann 1978; Mandell 1984; Wavlin 1984; Holt 1989; Allison 1993; Maguire 1999; Jarvie 2012). Notwithstanding arguments concerning structure and agency, and the impact of contrasting cultural contexts, shifts in our interpretation of social phenomena, such as gender, race and ethnicity, have, for example, been articulated through the changing configuration of global sport (Cashmore 2000; Malcolm 2012; Adair 2013; Pfister and Sisjord 2013). More recently, enhanced awareness of disability rights and increased prominence of disability in the public policy sphere have been linked by writers and commentators to the expansion of disability sport (Brittain 2004; LaVaque-Manty 2005; Howe 2008; Bundon and Clark 2014; Active Policy Solutions n.d.; Laureus n.d.). The most prominent elements of this expanded infrastructure āthe International Paralympic Committee with its attendant governance and development organisations, National Paralympic Committees , emerging parasport federations and organising committees for regional and international competitions including the Paralympic Games āconstitute what has come to be known as the Paralympic Movement . It is the development of this movement, borne as it was, out of inter-organisational tensions and rivalries that provide the focus for this Handbook.
Disability sports generally and parasports more specifically are a very recent phenomenon āso recent indeed that as explored in the Handbook, the institutional trappings of national and international federations have yet to be established in the context of a number of parasports . The first Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 (widely associated with the emergence of the Paralympic Movement ), took place 69 years ago and so the early Stoke Mandeville Games and the first Paralympic Games (1960) are still within the lifetime of some. A number of athletes who participated in the early Paralympic Games are still alive today (e.g. Margaret Maughan from Great Britain who won Britainās first ever Paralympic gold medal in Rome in 1960 and was given the honour of lighting the cauldron at the London 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony). At the same time, the growth in breadth and depth of what became known as the Paralympic Games was very rapid. With 328 athletes from 21 countries competing across nine sports in 1960 (Brittain 2014), this has increased to 4328 athletes from 157 countries competing across 22 sports in 2016 (IPC Website 2017). Yet despite this sharp upward trajectory and a corresponding expansion of public interest in the Games, there was, until recently, a surprising scholarly vacuum surrounding the topic. Since the start of the twenty-first century, this began to change. The sharpening of international interest in disability rights reflected for example in negotiations leading to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN 2006), the increasing (albeit unevenly distributed globally) resourcing of disability sport and the expansion of academic programmes associated with the study of sport, have all contributed to a marked increase in research and publications associated with disability sport and the Paralympic Games (DePauw and Gavron 1995; Bailey 2008; Howe 2008; Thomas and Smith 2008; Legg and Gilbert 2011; Schantz and Gilbert 2012; Brittain 2016). Research and development in adaptive training techniques and prosthetics associated with enhanced performance of Paralympic athletes contributed to a further increase in scholarly outputs (Swartz and Watermeyer 2008; Zettler 2009; Burkett 2010). Notwithstanding the rapid increase of published material, while chapters on disability sport and the Paralympic Games have appeared in a number of sports studies Handbooks, to date there has not been a Handbook devoted solely to the study of Paralympic sport and the development of the Paralympic Movement . This Handbook is an attempt to address this deficit.
It is perhaps inevitable that the terms of reference for the development of the Paralympic Movement can be found in the āparallelā narrative of the Olympic Movement. The modern Olympic Games were conceived in the twilight of the nineteenth century after a long period of gestation (MacAloon 2007). The organisation of the Games reflected in large part, the social and political mores of the era. Initially dominated by white males from Western Europe and North America, drawn from a particular socio-economic class, its expansion over time began to reflect changing social attitudes and the shifting global balance of power. In contrast to the Paralympic Movement , the development of the Olympic Movement has long been the basis of a significant and expanding body of literature (partly generated through the various Olympic Studies Centres globally) from many disciplinary perspectives (e.g. Espy 1979; Kanin 1981; Hazan 1982; Hoberman 1986; Guttmann 1992; Hill 1996; Kaplanidou and Karadakis 2010; Beacom 2012; Jefferson Lenskji and Wagg 2012; Girginov 2013; IOC 2015). From a socio-political perspective, this has included a debate regarding the potential of the Olympic Movement to have a measure of agency, influencing wider social and political development (Kidd 2008; Spaaij 2012). Certainly at the time of initiation, the Movement was primarily an educational one (MĆ¼ller 2000). This has remained an important element of its work, reflected in the growth of Olympic Education initiatives. Lately, the Movement has become increasingly engaged with international development and more specifically, the so-called sport for development and peace (SDP) agenda. While it would be over-simplistic to present the development of the much younger Paralympic Movement as following the same trajectory, there are similar characteristics and the Handbook addresses these in some detail. In this respect, it can be considered as a companion resource to the Palgrave Handbook of Olympic Studies (Jefferson Lenskji and Wagg 2012).
This Handbook is particularly timely given the experiences of the Rio Games of 2016 and preparations for the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang and 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, all of which are taking place outside the EuropeanāNorth American axis traditionally associated with the Olympic Movement. While all Olympic and Paralympic Games are characterised by pressures peculiar to their historical and geo-political setting, in recent years, tensions have been mounting on a number of fronts. The bidding process for Olympic and Paralympic Games has, in recent years, been on a downward trajectory in terms of the number of bidding cities as municipal authorities, as well as a range of other key national and regional stakeholders , look increasingly critically at the balance between costs and benefits associated with hosti...
