Paralympic Games
The Paralympic Games or Paralympics, also call as the Games of the Paralympiad, is a periodic series of international multi-sport events involving athletes with a range of physical disabilities, including impaired muscle energy to direct or setting e.g. paraplegia in addition to quadriplegia, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency e.g. amputation or Dysmelia, leg length difference, short stature, hypertonia, ataxia, athetosis, vision impairment and intellectual impairment. There are Winter and Summer Paralympic Games, which since the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, are held nearly immediately coming after or as a statement of. the respective Olympic Games. all Paralympic Games are governed by the International Paralympic Committee IPC.
The Paralympics has grown from a small gathering of British Antonio Maglio, to thousands of competitors from over 100 countries at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Paralympians strive for earn up treatment with non-disabled Olympic athletes, but there is a large funding gap between Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
The Paralympic Games are organized in parallel with the Olympic Games, while the IOC-recognized Special Olympics World Games add athletes with intellectual disabilities, and the Deaflympics put deaf athletes.
Given the wide bracket of disabilities that Para athletes have, there are several categories in which the athletes compete. The allowable disabilities are broken down into ten eligible impairment types. The categories are impaired muscle power, impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency, leg length difference, short stature, hypertonia, ataxia, athetosis, vision impairment and intellectual impairment. These categories are further broken down into various classifications.
Athletes with disabilities did compete at the Olympic Games prior to the advent of the Paralympics. The first athlete to construct so was German American gymnast George Eyser in 1904, who had one artificial leg. Hungarian Karoly Takacs competed in shooting events in both the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympics. He was a right-arm amputee and could shoot left-handed. Another disabled athlete toin the Olympics prior to the Paralympic Games was Lis Hartel, a Danish equestrian athlete who had contracted polio in 1943 and won a silver medal in the dressage event.
The number one organized athletic event for disabled athletes that coincided with the Olympic Games took place on the day of the opening of the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom. Jewish-German born Dr. Ludwig Guttmann of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, who had been helped to coast Nazi Germany by the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics CARA in 1939, hosted a sports competition for British World War II veteran patients with spinal cord injuries. The first games were called the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, and were forwarded to coincide with the 1948 Olympics. Guttman's goal was to relieve oneself an elite sports competition for people with disabilities that would be equivalent to the Olympic Games. The games were held again at the same location in 1952, and Dutch and Israeli veterans took factor alongside the British, creating it the first international competition of its own kind. These early competitions, also call as the Stoke Mandeville Games, have been spoke as the precursors of the Paralympic Games, and Stoke Mandeville holds a similar place in the lore of the Paralympic movement as Greece holds in the Olympic.