Fitness health centre

About the Paralympics

What is the Paralympics?

The Paralympic Games started as a sports event for World War Two veterans with spinal injuries. They began in 1948 - the year of the last London Olympics - at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Since then, they have grown into an elite international event for disabled athletes. There are summer and winter Paralympic Games held immediately following the Olympic Games.

At the Beijing Paralympics in 2008, 3,951 athletes from 146 countries were represented - and, with more classifications having been introduced, London 2012 is set to be even bigger.

How is the Paralympics structured?

The Paralympic Games are broken down into six broad categories:

• Amputees with an amputation of at least one major joint or part of an extremity missing (for example, elbow, wrist, knee, or ankle). The missing joint or part of an extremity may be congenital, from birth, or acquired due to illness or injury.
• Cerebral Palsy is a condition in which muscle tone, reflexes, posture or movement are affected by impairment to the brain. This condition may occur pre-birth, at birth or acquired as a result of a stroke or head injury.
• Visual impairment - athletes are classified by the amount of vision impairment from reduced visual field to full blindness.
• Spinal injury - this includes an injury, illness or congenital condition which damages the spinal cord causing paralysis in specific areas of the body. Athletes are typically classified based on the location of the lesion in the spine (the segment of the spine where the damage has occurred). Athletes with medical conditions that result in similar loss of muscle function (eg, spina bifida and poliomyelitis) are also included in this group of athletes with spinal injury.
• Les autres - this group of athletes has a range of conditions that result in physical impairments that do not fall into the other classification categories (eg, arthrogryposis).
• Intellectual disability refers to a cognitive impairment affecting brain function. At the London 2012 Paralympics, athletes with an intellectual disability will participate in the athletics, swimming and table tennis events.

These categories are known as classifications. They help define who can compete and which athletes can compete against each other.

"There is such a wide spectrum of disabilities among people who compete," says Sophia Warner, a British Paralympic sprinter who has cerebral palsy. "What I would urge anybody to do is just to find how the classifications work. What people don't realise is what the athletes have gone through and how massive their achievement is."

The Paralympics: Athletes

Each Paralympic athlete is assigned a sporting class, according to the rules of the sport in which they compete. This typically comprises a letter and a number (e.g. T42, F36, S9).

"Within the Paralympics, I will only be racing against T35s," says Warner. "I have had people think that's because I was only racing against people who were 35 years old!"