Wheelchair Sports

Wheelchair sports developed concurrently in England and America after World War II. In England, Sir Ludwig Guttmann, director of the National Spine Injuries Centre, introduced wheelchair sports as therapy for paraplegic war veterans. Guttmann recognized that participation in athletics had both physical and psychological value for individuals paralyzed from trauma or disease.

In the United States, the wheelchair sports movement originated from the desire of disabled World War II veterans to engage in competitive sports. The first competitive sport organized for the physically disabled was wheelchair basketball, which began in several Veterans Administration hospitals as early as 1945, under the auspices of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. In 1949, five community-based basketball teams from the Midwest and one team from Hines Veterans Administration Hospital in suburban Chicago participated in the first National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament in Galesburg, Ill. At the end of the tournament, the participants agreed to repeat the event annually and to establish the National Wheelchair Basketball Association (NWBA) to govern the sport.

The wheelchair sports movement in the United States was associated exclusively with basketball until 1957, when the first National Wheelchair Games were held in New York. A year later, the National Wheelchair Athletic Association (NWAA) was established to provide opportunities for disabled athletes to participate in sports other than basketball. The NWAA now governs competition in air gun shooting, archery, swimming, table tennis, weight lifting, and track and field events, and it sponsors annual national competitions in these wheelchair sports. National associations also exist for the wheelchair sports of bowling, racketball, softball and tennis.

In 1976, the first Olympiad for the Physically Disabled was held in Toronto, Ontario. More than 1,500 blind, paralyzed and amputee athletes from 38 countries participated in these games. The Toronto Games represented the emergence of athletic competitions for the disabled as sporting events in their own right.(3) In October 1988, approximately 3,000 athletes competed in 19 events at the Eighth Paralympics in Seoul, South Korea.

In wheelchair sports competition, the degree of disability becomes the critical factor in performance. To provide fair and equal competition, medical classification systems have been devised to ensure that individuals with a similar degree of disability compete against each other. Thus, a quadriplegic athlete with limited hand function is not required to compete against an above-knee amputee athlete with normal upper extremity function.

Next article: Wheelchair Archery – An Introduction To The Challenging Game

Followed by:

Wheelchair Basketball - A Physical Game

Wheelchair Tennis - Cardiovascular Exercise

Wheelchair Skiing

Wheelchair Accessibe Hunting

Wheelchair Accessible Camping

Wheelchair Track and Field: Road Racing