Everything you need to know about the Paralympics

The party doesn't end with August's Olympics Games. In September, disabled athletes from around the world will compete in the Paralympics. We've put together a cheat sheet of the Games' history, events, and controversies

History

The founder of the Paralympics was Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, a German-born Jewish neurologist who fled to England in 1939. He was working in a Buckinghamshire hospital with British war veterans who had suffered spinal cord injuries when he decided that sport could play a role in their recovery. In 1948, Guttmann organised a competition to coincide with the London Olympics, which would evolve into the first official Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960. The first Winter Paralympics were held in Sweden in 1976. It is only since the Seoul Olympics of 1988 that the Olympics and Paralympics have been held in the same place, in accordance with Guttmann’s first competition.

The sports

Paralympians are categorized into five different groups: spinal cord injury, amputee, visual impairment, cerebral palsy and ‘les autres’ (those who don’t fit the others). There are 20 different events, with rowing introduced for the first time this year. Other sports include wheelchair rugby, which was made famous by the Oscar-nominated documentary Murderball; boccia, which is similar to petanque and played by people with cerebral palsy; and goalball, a game for the visually impaired which was invented in 1946 to help the rehabilitation of World War II veterans. The visually impaired compete in separate events, but the rest are grouped according to their functional ability rather than the nature of their disability (i.e. an amputee athlete could race an athlete with cerebral palsy). The deaf have their own competition called the Deaflympics, the next of which will be held in Taiwan next year.

Chinese domination

If China is hoping to win the most gold medals during the Olympics, it is likely to be utterly dominant in the Paralympics. Ever since Beijing won the right to host the Olympics in 2001, the Government has ploughed money into disabled as well as able-bodied sports. This showed at the 2004 Athens Paralympics when China won 141 medals, including 63 golds, which was a long way ahead of second-placed Britain, who took 94 medals and 35 golds.

Controversies

After the 2000 Sydney Games, when the Spanish basketball was found to contain players who weren’t cognitively impaired, athletes with mental disabilities were no longer allowed to compete. Nowadays, as well as fighting against performance-enhancing drugs, Paralympic organisers must also counter a technique called "boosting." In order to raise blood pressure and improve performance, some athletes (mainly paraplegics who won’t feel the pain) have used techniques like sitting on pins or tying wire around their privates.