disabled sports

[sergiocastro]

when start the history about disabled people in around the world?

[wildwood]

I don't understand your question sergiocastro, but the disabled sports are becoming a joke! perfectly able people competing because some quack certified them as disabled. It is an embarrasment and insult to genuinly disabled people.

[JohnPPotts]

One of the problems with disabled sports is that as soon as you define a disablity, if it's truly competitive then you'll get people who just meet the minimum criteria - ie, don't seem very disabled. Though I agree with Wildwood, some events are simply ridiculous - I sure I recall a "100m for those with learning disabilities" - how does that affect running?

[Kit]

Steady on, friends. Simply having a "disabled" label does not automatically qualify you to compete - athletes have a very detailed assessment to decide their competition category (to ensure that, as far as possible, athletes competing in the same group have the same level of disability.) There are strict criteria governing inclusion and exclusion, and as a former assessor for the British Sports Association for the Disabled, I can say with certainty that many people are excluded because their level of disability is too minor to compete fairly. Learing disability can be associated with low muscle tone and poor co-ordination, both of which will affect running. Now that's out of the way, back to the original question - if you want to know when competitive sports were first organised for people with disabilities - the Stoke Mandeville Games (later the Internation Wheelchair Games) were organised in 1948 for people with spinal injury, and became international in 1952. The Paralympics (short for PARAllel, not PARAplegic) were started in 1960, and although they originally catered just for spinal injured athletes, from 1975 onwards they have included other groups such as cerebral palsy, visual impairment, learning disability, amputees and "Les Autres" - a group of varied conditions that don't fit into any other category. For more information, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympics2000/paral
ympics/959701.stm , and http://www.paralympic.org/ (look under "Paralympic Games - General - History - Summer Games - Overview" for detailed history of when each group was added.)

[mikewith]

Thank you Kit for a sensible answer (at last!) to this question.

[Kit]

Appreciated, mikewith! :)