The 2016 Paralympic Games will start tonight in the beautiful city of Rio de Janeiro where 4350 athletes from more than 160 countries are expected to compete for the medals in 22 different sports.
The Games have now grown into a full-fledged event on the footsteps of the Olympic Games. But the origin of the Paralympic Games goes back to the period post-World War II where the event started as an archery competition among 16 wheelchair-bound British World War II veterans which was conducted at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, about an hour east of Oxford in England. The date of the competition is said to be 29 July 1948, which can be taken as the date of origin of the Paralympics.
Back at that time, the archery competition was the brainchild of Sir Ludwig Guttmann who was a German neurosurgeon who had fled Nazi Germany and left a job at Oxford University. After leaving the job at Oxford Guttman decided to work at the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville.
This centre had been opened in March 1944 to treat the service members and civilians who had suffered spinal cord injuries during the war. Ian Brittain, the writer of The Paralympics Games Explained, says that the list of patients admitted at the facility saw a high rise after the war days.
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Therefore, Guttmann saw what the patients were capable of and made them participate in sports to complete their rehabilitation. The doctor emphasized on helping the paraplegic patients to develop their strength even if they could never walk again.
Spinal injury cases were said to be “hopeless” at that point of time as many victims only lived for a matter of weeks, or at most a couple of years. The patients would often die of sepsis and kidney failure but the doctor believed that archery could help his patients. Brittain wrote that the sport was used as a tool to get the patients’ upper body strength back but he also said that “it was also one of the very few sports that, once proficient, paraplegics could compete on equal terms with their non-disabled counterparts.”
Brittain talked about how the facility team would travel around the country to participate in different events. He said, “This led to visits of teams from Stoke Mandeville to a number of non-disabled archery clubs in later years, which were very helpful in breaking down the barriers between the public and paraplegics.”
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The writer also mentioned that the participation in the ‘Stoke Mandeville Games’ had grown because of patients and doctors moving among different spinal units. He said that the facility received attention from around the country after related research was published in a now defunct journal called “The Cord”. This sporting event at Stoke Mandeville is thus known as the first ever Paralympic Games which eventually began attracting international athletes in 1952.
It is known that the competition had attracted an audience of 3000 to watch 200 athletes from eight different nations in 1953. The event featured sports such as netball, snooker, archery, table tennis, javelin, shot put and swimming.
Interestingly, the 1948 archery contest and the 1948 Olympic Games in London took place at the same time of the year and many scholars believe that it was intentional. However, the first time that the Olympics and the Paralympics were officially held parallelly was in Rome in 1960 where 400 athletes from 28 countries had taken part.
