The Paralympics is nearing its’ 17th Games, with this year’s 2024 edition being held in Paris. However, this isn’t factually correct – that depends on who you ask!
Way back in 1960, we had the first Paralympic Games, but it was also called the Stoke Mandeville Games. Why, I hear you ask.
Well, Ludwig Guttmann, a German Jewish neurologist, fled his country when the Second World War started in 1939 and settled in Britain. He got a research job, which led to him being approached by the Government to go to Stoke Mandeville and set up a specialist spinal cord injury unit in 1944.
When he arrived, patients with spinal cord injuries would die from 2 months to 2 years, and he was shocked at how they would ‘give up’ and just made them comfortable leading up to their deaths, so he came up with a plan to extend their lives and making sure they were valued.
With this plan, it was his way or no way. Guttmann’s approach to spinal cord injury was controversial at the time – with the main one being that patients got turned around in their beds every 2 hours.
One day he saw three patients playing around with broomsticks and a ball – like hockey – and realised that sport could help improve their lives. This was how the Stoke Mandeville Games started.
In 1948 he set up the Games to be patients playing against each other, and liaising with other professionals in the neuro departments across the world – and the Dutch came over for the next Games in 1952. This continued with other countries getting involved in 1956 until 1960 when the Paralympics ‘officially’ started in Rome alongside the Olympics.
This thread was loosely hung until 1968 when Mexico wouldn’t host the Paralympics, and that carried on until 1988 in Seoul. Back then, most countries wouldn’t see the Paralympics being there for the good, so it had to be moved away from the Olympic cities.
During that time, in 1972, 1976 and 1980 it wasn’t held in the city but elsewhere in the host country. In 1984, Illinois would only host one impairment so New York hosted some others but the spinal cord participants went back to Stoke Mandeville to take part there.
However, according to the first International Paralympic Committee president Dr Robert Steadward, there was no plan in place from 1960 to 1988 as the Paralympics weren’t supported and linked by the Olympic Committee like it is today.
Steadward helped make a difference by agreeing on a watertight plan with the International Olympic Committee, which took place from 1987 to 2000. Once it was completed and signed, from 2000 onwards, the host country that bids for the Olympics now has to include the Paralympics in its programme and we see it as it is today.
The Paralympic Games wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Professor Sir Ludwig Guttmann. You can view the whole story on YouTube under the title of ‘Para Legacy’.
Image Credit: Deposit Photos