Transcending adversity

It’s been a little over a week since London finished the biggest party ever hosted and tonight it will start all over again.

London 2012 venues were designed with both Games in mind although a number of changes have been made with refreshed colours and logos to represent the Paralympic movement, replacing the Olympic rings.

In addition to transforming existing venues, Eton Manor (tennis) and Brands Hatch (road cycling) are to be added. 

It took just over five days to transform the athlete’s village to accommodate nearly 2,000 wheelchair users, workshops (for wheelchairs and prostheses) and assistance dogs. The workshops alone have 14 tonnes of equipment and spare parts.

The majority of the 2.5 million tickets have been sold and organisers are hoping for the first sell-out in the 52-year history of the event. The athletes will also be hoping to generate the same levels of public support witnessed at the Olympics.

The concept of using sport to rehabilitate spinal cord injuries started in 1948 when Sir Ludwig Guttman, a neurologist working with Second World War veterans at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, arranged a sporting competition between several hospitals to coincide with the London Olympics being held at the time. 

Four years later it became the International Stoke Mandeville Games when a small team of Dutch war veterans travelled to England to compete against the British athletes. The Paralympic Games, as they are now known, were first held (in parallel which is where the Paralympic name is derived) in Rome in 1960 when 400 athletes from 23 nations competed in six events. The first sport contested was archery with wheelchair racing only being added at Tokyo in 1964.

This year, London will see 4,200 athletes participate in 20 sports in what is expected to be the largest event the Paralympic Games has ever seen.

It can be confusing with new sports, familiar sports with adapted rules and different disability classifications to consider.

For example, London will be introducing a new colour-coded graphical illustration to help make it easier for spectators to understand the level of disability with red indicating the most severe impairments and green showing the parts of the body where there are none.

There is also coding with a letter indicating the unique event while the number indicates the impairment category. 

For example, in athletics T denotes Track while F represents Field. F40 is for athletes with short stature, F42-46 are for limb deficiencies and T51-54 are for wheelchair athletes.

Interestingly, it is not necessarily the level of disability but the difficulty the athlete faces in competing in the given event. In swimming, for example, different impairment classifications can race against each other as some more able-bodied athletes may have difficulty in holding their body in a good position in the water.

It would not be sport without controversy! The Paralympics witnessed its first contretemps in 1980 when Russia refused to host a parallel event, forcing 2,500 disabled athletes to compete in Holland instead.

Every year sees complaints about athletes having managed to work their way into an easier disabled category. Although Paralympians are subjected to similar drug tests as able-bodied athletes, one intriguing area that the testers have to consider is that of self-harming. 

According to some, as many as seven out of 10 athletes with spinal disorders will inflict injury on their lower anatomy in order to increase blood pressure and flow, thereby enhancing performance through the increased delivery of oxygen to hard-working muscles. Some of the techniques used include breaking toes and administering electric shocks, although some have also been known to include sitting on a drawing pin, over-filling the bladder by clamping a catheter or even twisting and then sitting on the scrotum. All are banned and will be closely monitored.

Another thing to watch out for at this year’s Games will be the category for the ‘disability you cannot see’, those with learning difficulties. The reintroduction of the S14 category marks a breakthrough in testing and classification. Those with learning disabilities have been unable to compete at the Paralympics for the last 12 years after the Spanish basketball team won gold only for it to later be revealed that their winning team included a lawyer, an engineer and several students.

With a surge in the number of those competing attributed to the large number of civilians and military personnel to have lost limbs as a result of hidden explosive devices, there are still strong links to the origins of the sport.

One of the better known Paralympians is there due to a birth defect while others can recount harrowing tales of having legs removed by a great white shark or similarly inspirational stories of overcoming adversity. 

The ‘fastest man on no legs’, Oscar Pistorius, will be aiming to defend his 100m, 200m and 400m titles although his greatest achievement to date was surely having become the first amputee to race in the Olympics, reaching the semi-finals in his favoured 400m.

The Blade Runner (as he is affectionately known) will defend his 200m title on Sunday, although he will face the fiercest competition in the 100m on September 6.

The opening ceremony, entitled Enlightenment, will take place this evening at 10.30pm with 28 gold medals to be won by the end of the Games, the majority in the pool or at the velodrome. 

China is again expected to dominate the medals table although Great Britain will be hoping to take second place. The closing ceremony will be held on 9th September.

New sports with no Olympic counterpart include Boccia (for wheelchair athletes where a ball is thrown similar to Boules) and Goalball (for the visually impaired where a ball containing a bell is rolled into goals) and the crowd is required to be silent!

Those seeking intense competition can tune in to murderball, or wheelchair rugby to use its more common name.

Invented by a team of Canadian quadriplegics in 1977, teams of four attempt to get the ball over the opponents’ line and are required to have two wheels over the try-line. This competition starts next Wednesday.