A Hospital Competition in 1948
The Paralympics began at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England. Ludwig Guttmann, a German-Jewish doctor who had fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with the help of an academic rescue organisation, organised a sports competition for British veterans of the Second World War with spinal cord injuries.
He deliberately timed it. The first event, called the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, was held on the day the 1948 Summer Olympics opened in London. Guttmann's stated aim was an elite competition for people with disabilities that would be the equivalent of the Olympics.
It repeated annually at the same site and grew. In 1952 Dutch and Israeli veterans took part alongside the British, making it the first international competition of its kind.
Stoke Mandeville now holds a place in Paralympic history comparable to Olympia in Olympic history. Since 2012 the Paralympic flame has included a heritage flame lit there, and from 2024 the torch relay officially begins at Stoke Mandeville.
Rome, and Then the World
In 1960 the ninth annual games left Britain for the first time, held in Rome to coincide with the Olympics there. These were later designated the first Paralympic Games, and unlike the earlier events they were no longer restricted to war veterans.
They were the idea of Antonio Maglio, a doctor and follower of Guttmann, and were financed almost entirely by his employer, an Italian workers' accident insurance fund. Four hundred athletes from 23 countries competed.
The early games were open only to athletes in wheelchairs. That changed at the 1976 Summer Games, which included athletes with other disabilities for the first time and expanded to 1,600 competitors from 40 countries. The first Winter Paralympics were held the same year in Sweden.
Since 1960 the Paralympics have taken place in the same year as the Olympics. The 2020 Summer Paralympics featured 4,520 athletes from 163 national committees.
Sharing the City
The turning point for the modern arrangement was Seoul in 1988. For the first time the Summer Paralympics were held directly after the Olympics, in the same host city, using most of the same venues.
That pattern was repeated in 1992, 1996 and 2000 before being formalised in an agreement between the International Paralympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee in 2001. The two bodies have since extended that contract to 2032.
The Winter Games took a little longer. The 1992 Winter Paralympics were held in the same region but used different venues, and only from 1994 did the Winter Paralympics share venues and an organising committee with the Winter Olympics. From that year the Winter Games also moved onto their own cycle, falling two years after the Summer Games.
The name has shifted meaning along the way. It was originally a blend of paraplegic and Olympic, which stopped being accurate as other disability groups joined.
Alongside, Not Below
The current explanation of the name uses the Greek preposition para, meaning beside or alongside, so that Paralympic describes a competition held in parallel with the Olympics. The term came into official use at Seoul in 1988.
The symbols carry the same idea. The flag shows three shapes called Agitos, from the Latin for I move, arranged in a circle around a central point to represent athletes gathering from everywhere in the world. They are red, blue and green, the three colours most common in national flags. The motto is Spirit in Motion, adopted along with the symbol in 2003.
Athletes are grouped by classification, a system that sorts competitors by how much their impairment affects performance, so that the competition measures skill rather than degree of disability.
Other events cover different ground. The Deaflympics have run since 1924 exclusively for deaf athletes, and the Special Olympics World Games are for athletes with intellectual disabilities, who have also competed in the Paralympics since 1992.
