The Paralympic torch now starts at a hospital in Stoke Mandeville
Olympic flames are lit at Olympia; from 2024, Paralympic torch relays officially begin at Stoke Mandeville, the English hospital where Ludwig Guttmann held a wheelchair competition for injured war veterans on the day the 1948 London Olympics opened. That small event grew into games with thousands of athletes.
Guttmann, a German-Jewish doctor, had escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 with help from a refugee academics' council. His 1948 International Wheelchair Games brought together British veterans with spinal cord injuries, and he hoped to create an elite contest on a par with the Olympics. The event returned to the same site each year, and in 1952 Dutch and Israeli veterans joined, making it international. Since 2012 the Paralympic flame has included a heritage flame lit there, at first merged with flames from the host nation.
The ninth edition left Britain for Rome in 1960, timed with that year's Olympics and no longer limited to veterans; it was later counted as the first Paralympic Games. The idea came from Antonio Maglio, a doctor and follower of Guttmann, and Italy's national workers' accident insurance fund paid almost all the costs. About 400 athletes from 23 countries took part. Early Games admitted only wheelchair users; the 1976 Summer Games opened to other disabilities and grew to 1,600 athletes from 40 countries. By 2020 the Summer Paralympics drew 4,520 competitors from 163 national committees.
Since the Seoul Games of 1988 the Paralympics have followed shortly after the matching Olympics, in both summer and winter, all run by the International Paralympic Committee. Athletes compete within ten eligible impairment types, among them impaired muscle power, limb deficiency, short stature, hypertonia, ataxia, vision impairment and intellectual impairment, each split into subclasses. People with intellectual disabilities have competed since 1992, alongside the separate Special Olympics, while the Deaflympics, held since 1924, serve deaf athletes.
Disabled athletes also reached the Olympics themselves. German-American gymnast George Eyser competed in 1904 with an artificial leg. Olivér Halassy, a Hungarian amputee, played water polo at three straight Games from 1928, and Károly Takács, who had lost his right arm, shot left-handed in 1948 and 1952. Danish rider Lis Hartel, who contracted polio in 1943, won dressage silver in 1952.
Source: Paralympic Games
