Ludwig Guttmann – Founder of Paralympic Games
The Paralympic Games are held once every four years. The next event will be held in 2012, in London, running in conjunction with the main Olympics event. The Paralympics draws crowds from all over the world and in 2012 it is expected that the athletes will
be competing in front of huge crowds of almost two million fans. The popularity of the sports event has grown steadily over the past 60 years following its meagre beginnings as an event for World War II veterans. In the years to come this exciting and noble
event will continue to grow and become more popular.
The man who is known to be the founder of the Paralympics was Ludwig Guttmann. He was a Jewish neurologist who lived through the Second World War, an unlikely candidate to begin a sports event. He was a well respected and intelligent man who was invited
to attend Oxford University in the UK in 1939 at the start of the War. After his studies, he began working at a Hospital in Buckinghamshire, England. He was tasked with working in the Spinal Injury Department in Stoke Mandaville Hospital near Aylesbury and
in 1944 became director of the centre.
Guttmann worked with numerous disabled patients over the years and found that a big problem for a lot of them was that they lost confidence, became anti-social and withdrawn with time. It was his firm belief that disabled people would benefit from sports
as a method of therapy and to alleviate some of these problems. This belief that has now developed into a well respected and well formed method of healthcare and a whole branch of medical care has emerged from his teachings and methods.
In 1948, Guttmann hosted the very first sporting competition for the disabled called the Stoke Mandeville Games. They are today called the World Wheelchair and Amputee Games and in 1960 in Rome, after the Olympics, the ninth international Stoke Mandaville
Games became the first ever Paralympic Games. The competitors were some of his previous patients who were former World War II veterans with spinal cord injuries. The events involved in the first few years of the Paralympics spanned from archery, water polo,
table tennis, the javelin throw and netball. The rules of netball at the time were actually very similar to the original rules of basketball, for example no dribbling and only 1 point per net. The wheelchairs that were used for this original game were cumbersome
and not very practical but the sport allowed the players to compete just as any able bodied person did.
Today, Wheelchair Basketball is one of the world’s most popular disabled sport and is played in over 82 countries worldwide. It became a world championship sport in 1973 and whilst the fundamental rules of basketball remained the same, they were adapted
to accommodate the wheelchairs. An example of these adaptations is that ‘travelling’ with the ball is changed simply from taking two steps without dribbling to a player not touching the wheel twice without dribbling. The popularity of this game has extended
to the point that able bodied athletes are willing to put themselves in the wheelchairs for the matches so that they are allowed to compete.
Disabled sports in today’s society are extremely varied. The most recent popular craze involved many forms of dancing. In the UK there has recently been a competition on television in which disabled and able bodied couples compete in a ballroom dancing competition.
In an even more skilled example, there is actually a disabled break-dancing competition called the Lazy Legs Competition, just further proving that boundaries are still being broken as to the limitations of disabled people.
It is clear that Ludwig Guttmann, whilst not a professional sportsman himself, made a huge impact on the world of sport. He not only hosted the world’s first Paralympic games and provided a basis for the world renowned sport Wheelchair Basketball but he
did all this as a method of aiding his patients by developing the concept of Sports Therapy, now a well known form of rehabilitation in the healthcare sector. By raising the profile of disabled sports, Guttmann has opened the door for many other disabled activities
that were previously not thought possible.
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