A Level Playing Field

A Level Playing Field

The Evolution of Rehabilitative, Recreational, and Competitive Sports for people with Disabilities

Story by J.R. Wilson

In the quarter-century since enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an expanded number of sports programs have arisen – in the United States and globally – dedicated to people with disabilities and giving them access to a growing number of sports, including some “high risk” activities, such as rock and mountain climbing, snow and water skiing, high-speed cycle racing, and scuba diving.

Sports for individuals with disabilities did not begin to attract serious interest until they were used as a rehabilitative therapy for the thousands of wounded soldiers returning from World War II and for civilians who had been impaired during the conflict – especially those injured during the London Blitz. Sports as rehabilitation later grew into recreational sports and then into competitive sports.

The most important of the competitive sporting events for people with disabilities was the Stoke Mandeville Games, organized to coincide with the 1948 London Olympic Games by Sir Ludwig Guttmann, an escapee from Nazi Germany who became a practicing neurosurgeon at England’s Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Beginning then with wheelchair athletes, the Stoke Mandeville Games eventually evolved into the modern Paralympic Games, governed by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). The Paralympic Games are closely tied to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as of 2000, as well as a wide range of other international sports organizations.

The movement expanded to those with intellectual disabilities with a series of summer camps organized by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in 1962. Shriver had firsthand knowledge of the difficulties that individuals with intellectual disabilities faced at that time: her older sister, Rosemary Kennedy, to whom Shriver was very close, was born with an intellectual disability. Shriver grew up well aware of the limited programs and activities available for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, but her experience growing up with Rosemary and playing sports together showed her that when given the same opportunities as everyone else, people with intellectual disabilities could accomplish much. She started Camp Shriver in her backyard as a place for young people with intellectual disabilities to excel through participation in a variety of sports and physical activities. In 1968, sports for those with intellectual disabilities grew into the first International Special Olympics, held in Chicago, Illinois.

About the same time, Disabled Sports USA (DSUSA) was created – originally as the National Amputee Skiers Association – to help rehabilitate disabled warfighters. In the nearly half-century since, DSUSA has grown into one of the largest multi-sport, multi-disability organizations in the United States, with sports programs for more than 60,000 wounded warfighters, youth, and other adults each year.

“We have seen a very dramatic increase in the opportunities and types of sports that have become available to people with disabilities,” DSUSA Executive Director Kirk Bauer said. “What we have seen since the ADA is facilities have become much more accessible, which of course is of great benefit to all disabled persons. That includes hiking trails, biking trails, fishing piers, etc.

“What we have seen less of – and the challenge of this century – is a greater emphasis on programmatic accessibility. Persons with disabilities almost universally can now access bathrooms, facilities, pools, etc., but often the sports available to them have remained limited. We see that as an area that still needs a lot of growth and work.”

As a result of the ADA, he added, lack of access to facilities is no longer a serious problem in the United States, especially when DSUSA offers its support in making improvements.

“The ADA is a good backdrop because the owners and operators are aware of the law and we can offer to help them become accessible to this niche population,” he said. “With the ADA, they are more willing to work with us as a partner. Also partly due to the ADA, I’ve seen nothing short of a revolution in the adaptive equipment developed to level the playing field for those with disabilities.

“We now offer 40 different sports to those with severe disabilities, including snow and water skiing, rock climbing – one of [our rockclimbing participants] is a quadruple amputee – scuba and skin diving, and so on, all enabling individuals with disabilities to participate. The ADA provided more opportunities for participation and the participants demanded this kind of equipment, which companies sprang up to produce. For example, I took a team of double-amputees up Kilimanjaro, 19,000 feet, which no one would have thought possible only a few years ago. That’s an extreme example of what is possible now.”

The national teams of Brazil and China compete in sitting volleyball at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

Photo Courtesy if the International Paralympic Committee

The first Paralympics were held in 1960 in conjunction with the Rome Summer Olympics, but without the official support or cooperation of the IOC. An official partnership agreement was signed in 2000 to ensure, starting with the 2008 Beijing

Games, that all future Olympics and Paralympics would be organized by the same host. But host cities moved more quickly and began organizing the games, loosely but in a joint fashion, beginning with Seoul in 1988 and again in Barcelona in 1992.

This was not the case for the Atlanta Games in 1996, the first games held in the United States after the ADA was in place. When the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games refused to organize the Paralympic Games, local and national disability and sports organizations mounted a campaign to secure the right to host the Paralympic Games in Atlanta. The games were organized independently from the Olympic Games; however, marketing, facilities, branding, and fundraising agreements were signed to ensure that Olympic facilities would be used for the Paralympics. All the new construction in Atlanta was required to meet ADA guidelines for the Olympic Games, which it did, and in the 10 days between the end of the Olympic Games and the start of the Paralympic Games, additional accommodations, including more ramps and seating, were made in preparation for the higher-thanaverage number of individuals with disabilities attending the events, both as athletes and spectators, as well as other professionals with disabilities.

A match of wheelchair basketball takes place during the 1954 Stoke Mandeville Games. The Stoke Mandeville Games evolved into the modern Paralympic Games.

Daily Herald Archives/ Science & Society Picture Library

A legacy from the Atlanta Paralympics was BlazeSports America, which grew from a program helping youth with disabilities in Georgia to a national network of more than 65 clubs in 29 states and Washington, D.C., and then was transformed into a Paralympics sports club network several years ago. Since then, BlazeSports has returned to a concentration on Georgia, but with expanded programs for warfighters going through the military’s Warrior Transition Units (WTUs) at three Georgia bases. The WTUs provide personalized support to wounded, ill, and injured soldiers who require at least six months of rehabilitative care and complex medical management.

Jeff Jones, Sport & Community Programs director for BlazeSports America, was a coach in the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul and team leader for the 1992 games in Barcelona and 1996 games in Atlanta.

“I don’t have a disability, but as a coach have gotten into a wheelchair for basketball, softball, and other sports, plus adaptive skiing. It’s a lot easier to work with these sports if you have spent some time trying them yourself,” he explained, but added some sports still have not been fully opened to all athletes with disabilities. “Soccer is available only to those with head injuries; they have not provided an opportunity for amputees, which is becoming more popular because of state-of-the-art prosthetics.

“The technology out there today has opened a lot more doors for a lot more people. When I went to school, the textbooks said abovethe-knee amputees would never be able to run and most would be in wheelchairs – but today we have double amputees participating in running, skiing, etc. Outside the Paralympics, adaptive equipment now allows amputees to bowl, water ski, and do many other things that would have been impossible even 20 years ago.”

Jones credits the ADA with significantly improving the lives of people with disabilities, not only in sports but with respect to employment and other areas of life.

“Our work has been related to sports facilities – accessibility to pools, fitness centers, golf carts – things that have directly included the access of disabled persons to sporting events, as participants or observers. The ADA has helped provide opportunities for them to be a lot more active and lead a healthy, active lifestyle, which fights a lot of secondary problems that come with disabilities,” he continued.

“I think the ADA could do a lot more in dealing with accessibility issues related to sports and recreation facilities. Even so, the whole concept of accessibility in new facilities has been great, from the parking lot to the locker room. So ADA compliance has really increased access for anybody with a disability, which has come a long way in the past 25 years – and the acceptance of the Paralympics has increased with that.”

Paralympic gold medalist Ann Cody, a member of the International Paralympic Committee governing board and a former high school athlete disabled at age 16, competed in the 1988 Paralympic Games as a college junior, winning four silver medals in Seoul, South Korea, then a gold and a bronze in Barcelona in 1992. Seoul marked the first time in 24 years the Summer Paralympics took place in the same city as the Olympic Games.

The Special Olympics grew out of Camp Shriver, an event started by Eunice Kennedy Shriver as a place where young people with intellectual disabilities could compete and excel in a variety of physical activities.

Photo courtesy of Special Olympics International

“I wanted to know what was still available to me as a person with a disability and I found there was a collegiate sports program at the University of Illinois, which was internationally renowned for its accessibility campus-wide as well as its sports programs. It created opportunities for young GIs with injuries who could not get around other campuses because of their disabilities,” she said. “When I got to Illinois, there were Paralympians studying and training there, which put me into an environment with athletes and coaches competing at those levels. Illinois still produces a large number of Paralympians in wheelchair basketball and racing.

“I had been a team sport athlete prior to my disability, so I played wheelchair basketball in 1984; I did my first wheelchair race to maintain my conditioning in the off-season, starting in 1982, then discovered I really was a distance sport athlete. I did both for a while, but then concentrated on wheelchair racing. A lot of Paralympians discover different sports as they become involved with the Paralympics.”

The 23th Olympiad in Los Angeles also saw the IOC incorporate events for athletes with disabilities into the quadrennial event.

“The ADA has had a major impact on accessibility, not only in the U.S., but overseas as well. At the same time, the games themselves have changed the perceptions of disabilities in other countries. In Seoul, the games were critical to bringing visibility and awareness to what is possible for people with disabilities,” Cody said. “Korean Paralympic groups credit those games with helping accelerate their efforts nationally.”

Today, with advanced prosthetics, training, and individual determination, the Paralympic Games have grown to include almost every sport seen in the Olympic Games – and more – including:

• Archery

• Boccia

• Canoe

• Cycling

• Equestrian

• Football 5-a-Side

• Football 7-a-Side

• Goalball

• IPC Alpine Skiing

• IPC Biathlon

• IPC Powerlifting

• IPC Shooting

• IPC Swimming

• IPC Cross-country Skiing

• IPC Ice Sledge Hockey

• Judo

• Long Jump

• Rowing

• Sailing

• Sitting Volleyball

• Table Tennis

• Triathlon

• Wheelchair Tennis

• Wheelchair Basketball

• Wheelchair Curling

• Wheelchair Rugby

• Wheelchair Racing

• Wheelchair Fencing

• Wheelchair Tennis

“Some Olympic events are not widely enough practiced to be on the Paralympic schedule, but we do have the long jump, and some athletes, especially belowthe-knee amputees, are getting close to regular Olympians in the sprints. And there are some disabled athletes who have competed in regular Olympic events as well as the Paralympics.” For instance, Natalie du Toit of South Africa swam in both the Olympics and the Paralympics in Beijing in 2008.

Tim Brown, a Disabled Sports USA participant, climbs a rock face. Advances in technology, including improved prosthetics, have made it possible for people with disabilities to participate in a wider range of sports than ever before.

Ellen Thommesen and DSUSA

“We had 164 countries participating in London in 2012, where the Olympics usually have around 205. The winter games have a smaller number of countries competing in both games. In the 2014 winter games in Sochi, Russia, the Paralympic Games had 45 nations represented, with 550 athletes, compared with 2,873 in the Olympic Games. In the summer games in London, we had 4,237 Paralympians [compared to 10,568 in the Olympic Games].”

Another major change in highlevel competitive sports for people with disabilities has been the participation of women, which grew from 24 percent at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games to 36 percent in London 16 years later.

“The summer games are approaching a 50-50 split between male and female athletes, making incremental advances. The winter games have the same policies and focus in having events for women, but the percentage is not as high,” Cody said, adding there also has been a shift in the ages of athletes. “The average age in wheelchair basketball is probably slightly higher than the Olympics, but those ages are going down as we improve development of our youth pipeline.

“Military Paralympians tend to be in their 20s, for example, but it still takes time to develop as an athlete. We use the same athlete development timetable of 10 years and 10,000 hours of training and competition in a given sport as the Olympics, although there may not be the depth of pool in some sports quite yet. But a former military member’s history of physical fitness also can apply to that. Our Paralympic swim team looks like our Olympic swim team in terms of age.”

The ADA and growing visibility of events such as the Paralympics also have resulted in a growing interest in – and pressure to provide – sports for people with disabilities at the high school level.

“U.S. Paralympics is working with the National Federation of State High School Associations and there are disability sports organizations working with those at the state level. We also have had a big push with the Department of Education to look into it and they sent letters to all schools in the country, reminding them of their responsibility to provide equal opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in sports at all levels, which in turn spurred a lot of action at the state level,” Cody said.

“Even in metro areas and with the ADA, students go to the district in which they live, not to special schools, so they may not have a lot of other students with disabilities with whom they can form teams. That is part of the discussion going on with the schools on doing things a bit differently, perhaps at the district level. But track and field and swimming are sports where students with disabilities could be integrated into the existing programs. More than a dozen states have wheelchair events in their high school track and field championship events, which spurred more action at the district level.”

Athletes from the 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games speak to the media outside the White House before an East Room event honoring them hosted by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, April 3, 2014. From left to right, Julie Chu of Fairfield, Connecticut, who won silver with the women’s ice hockey team; Sage Kostenberg of Park City, Utah, who won a gold medal in slopestyle snowboarding; Jon Lujan of Littleton, Colorado, a Paralympics Alpine skier, former Marine Corps sergeant, and 2014 Winter Paralympic Games opening ceremony Team USA flag bearer; Mikaela Shiffrin, from Eagle-Vail, Colorado, who won gold in women’s slalom; and Stephanie Jallen of Kingston, Pennsylvania, who competed in the Paralympic Games in women’s Alpine skiing and won bronze in super-G and super combined.

Army News Service photo by Lisa Ferdinando

Disabled sports took another step forward in 2006 with creation of the Extremity Games by College Park Industries, a manufacturer of prosthetic feet, to give those with limb loss a competitive venue for “extreme” or “action” sports. Held each summer in Orlando, Florida, the games include competitions in skateboarding, wakeboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, surfing, motocross, and kayaking. Other organizations, such as Paradox Sports, later joined the effort to equip and help empower and inspire athletes with disabilities.

As the ADA helped people with disabilities gain greater access to jobs, education, and other activities to which they had faced restrictions and barriers in the past, sports for those living with disabilities grew in number, size, media coverage, and public recognition. Sportsmen and women with disabilities began seeking – and winning – approval to participate in events not specifically designed for them, transforming them from “disabled athletes” to athletes with disabilities. Moreover, their success, combined with revolutionary advances in prosthetics, have begun to blur the lines between those with disabilities and those without.

“Today some amputees can play basketball with modern prosthetics, although the Paralympics only has wheelchair basketball,” Cody noted. “An amputee sprinter in London [the 2012 Olympics] was challenged for having an unfair advantage because he was using a prosthetic, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled he could compete. In sports, the rules control whether a device or piece of equipment would provide an unfair advantage – and some robotic limbs are not allowed today. “People ask about whether the Olympic and Paralympic Games will ever merge. I think it is a possibility in the future, although not something we’re exploring at this time. In order to logistically combine the two, you would have to eliminate a lot of events, which would mean fewer opportunities for both Olympic and Paralympic athletes.”

“I’m afraid efforts to prevent the disabled from participating in non-disabled-specific sports due to an ‘unfair advantage’ from their prosthetics will come before such athletes are actually allowed to participate,” Jones predicted – the replacement of physical barriers addressed by the ADA with barriers built by attitudes and administrative restrictions.

“We hear more and more stories of people denied access due to a disability – and the administrators’ lack of understanding about both the disabled and the sport in question. So we are working on that at high schools and colleges around the country. Someday we hope the number of people trying to prevent opportunities for those with disabilities will drop to zero.” n