55 Access to Competitive Sport

Organized sport globally and in Canada has made great strides in recent decades on disability inclusion and participation.  After a series of demonstration events following World War II, in 1960 the first official Paralympic Games were held in Rome. These games were for athletes with spinal cord injuries and featured 400 athletes from 23 countries competing in archery, athletics, swimming, and wheelchair fencing.  The Paralympic Games have grown and evolved considerably, now featuring athletes with a wide range of disabilities, including amputations, vision loss, and cerebral palsy, competing in across 28 winter and summer sports. The Paralympic Games, governed by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), are now held in the same year as the Olympic Games and are one of the largest international sporting events in the world. The Paralympic movement has gone from marginal to much more visible, with paralympians starting to share the spotlight, alongside corporate sponsorship, product endorsements, etc. with able-bodied athletes. This is an enormous shift in two decades.

The Invictus Games are an international adaptive multi-sport event for wounded, injured, or sick service personnel and veterans.  Modeled after the Paralympic Games, with the goal of inspiring and motivating wounded service personnel and veterans on their journey to recovery, the first Invictus Games were held in 2014 in London, featuring more than 400 athletes from 13 nations competing in nine adaptive sports, including wheelchair basketball, sitting volleyball, and indoor rowing. Toronto hosted the Invictus Games in 2017.  There are many other international and national sporting events organized and designed for persons with disabilities, including the World Para Athletics Championships in track and field, and World Para Championships in hockey, swimming, powerlifting, dance and other sports. Hockey Canada hosts the Canadian National Para Hockey Championships, and there are national Para sporting events in swimming, athletics, skiing, and many other sports, from lawn bowling to archery.

Nonetheless, issues remain.  As paralympian and professor of kinesiology Dr. Danielle Peers at the University of Alberta asks, “what is the relationship of disability sport practices, policies and forms of representation to larger social justice issues around disability as well as other forms of marginalization?”^[1]