Disabled athletes from all over the world will meet in 2004 in Athens, symbol city of sport, in order to compete in about 20 different sport disciplines. It is an emblematic event, a testimony to the will to compete, to persevere and surpass oneself in a sporting spirit.
There is a need for the sport even among persons with disabilities. This will again be demonstrated next September, when in Athens' Olympic stadium, a torchbearer with a disability will light the sacred flame for the 2004 Paraolympics.
Cradle of the Olympics and of the sporting ideal which unites nations in a pure spirit of competition, Greece will welcome this year in its inimitable environmental, historical and cultural scenario, the 28th Olympic Games and the 12th edition of the Paraolympics reserved for disabled athletes. The term Paraolympics refers to the games in which only disabled athletes participate with the same spirit and enthusiasm as those who are not disabled, but with whom they cannot compete directly because of their limitations. Paraolympics are just like the Olympic Games and the International Olympic Committee has decided that they must take place in the same country as the Olympic Games.
The Paraolympics are a true sporting event and not only a simple demonstration of competitive capabilities of persons with disabilities.
The organization of the Paraolympics is not much less important than the Olympic Games: the majority of the 220 hotels in Athens are booked to host, from the 17th to the 28th of September, nearly 4,000 disabled athletes, coming from 130 countries and constituting 2,000 official teams. This is not counting a number of 1,000 technicians and 15,000 volunteers. More than 300 media representatives from newspapers, radio and television, have already been accredited to broadcast the event all over the world. For the first time in the history of the Paraolympics, the athletes will not have to pay any participation fee so as to encourage as much as possible the presence of athletes and eliminate any form of discrimination between Olympic and Paraolympic athletes.
Another first in Athens is the fact that the organization of both events will be entrusted to the same staff.
The first sporting events for disabled athletes took place in 1948 in Stoke Mandeville, UK. It was a competition involving athletes in wheelchairs, which took place on the same day and at the same time as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games taking place that year in London. Four years later another competition between disabled athletes was organized in Holland, giving birth to the Paraolympic movement.
However, only later disabled athletes succeeded in having organized a specific sporting event Olympic style, which occurred immediately after the 17th Rome Olympics in 1960. A number of 400 athletes from 23 countries participated in 8 sporting disciplines. From then on, the Paraolympics have always been organized every four years and in the same year as the Olympics. In 1976, after the Toronto Games, the first winter Paraolympics took place in Switzerland with flattering results.
In Seoul, in 1988, the Paraolympics obtained another important success because it was the first time that they took place in the same venue as the Olympics. This practice became the rule for all successive editions except in 1980, when the Soviet Union refused to organize the Paraolympics maintaining that there were no persons with disabilities in the territory.
Some may believe that competing disabled athletes in the Paraolympics are not able to obtain significant results, but that is not at all true. As a matter of fact, their athletic performances are of high level and their records are no doubt comparable to those of Olympians.
Canadian Donovan Bailey holds the world record for the 100 meters in 8' 84", and Nigerian Ajibola Adoye, an arm amputee, has covered the same distance in 10' 72". In four categories of weightlifting the Paraolympic record winners are superior to the Olympic winners by 12 kilograms.
Of course, one must keep in mind that persons with disabilities have limits because of which they cannot compete in all sports, for example judo is practiced only by blind athletes.

PARAOLYMPICS IN HISTORY