According to the World Health Organization, 16% of the world’s 8.2 billion people — virtually 1.3 billion in total — experience a significant disability.
Yesterday in Paris, France, in a testament to the strength of the human spirit, well over 4,000 athletes with various disabilities from more than 150 countries gathered in fellowship at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Paralympics before they began competing today in their individual disciplines.
The Paralympics will close on September 8, and by then will have seen medals awarded in 549 events in 22 sports, among them swimming, sitting volleyball, judo, 5-a-side adaptive football (men only) for athletes with visual impairments, track and field, and wheelchair basketball.
The Paralympics was born out of the Stoke Mandeville Games, which were organized by Dr. Ludwig Guttman and carried out the day of the 1948 London Olympics opening ceremony. The first Paralympics event was held in 1960 in Rome, Italy. It involved 16 wheelchair-bound injured service members competing in archery. The first Winter Paralympics was held in Sweden in 1976.
New York City was the host of the 1984 Summer Paralympics — the last time the Games did not take place in the same city as the Summer Olympics. Since the 1988 Seoul (South Korea) Summer Games and the 1992 Albertville (France) Winter Games, the Paralympics are now held in the same city as the Olympics roughly two weeks after the latter’s conclusion. The United States has competed in every summer and winter Paralympics and leads in the all-time medal count with 2,283; 808 of them gold.
Tatyana McFadden, a five-time NYC Marathon women’s wheelchair winner and eight-time Paralympics gold medalist; sprinter Brittni Mason, a three-time Paralympics medalist; and Chuck Aoki, who has won three Paralympic medals as a key player for the men’s wheelchair rugby team, are headliners for the USA’s 225-member contingent this year.