Theme Issue: Exercise and Sports The Paralympic Movement: Using Sports to Promote Health, Disability Rights, and Social Integration for Athletes With Disabilities Cheri Blauwet, MD, Stuart E. Willick, MD Abstract: Competitive sports for people with disabilities has grown rapidly over the past several decades, and opportunities for participation are increasingly available throughout the spectrum from developmental to elite. The Paralympic Games, seen as the pinnacle sporting event that represents the broader Paralympic Movement, has provided a platform to showcase the abilities of people with disabilities while also serving as a catalyst for disability rights through ensuring integration, equality of opportunity, and accessibility of the built environment. Concurrently, media coverage of the Paralympic Games has led to an increased awareness of opportunities for sport participation for individuals with disabilities and, with it, the adjustment of norms regarding expectations for exercise as a component of preventive health. In addition, there is evidence of the power of sports to stimulate confidence, self-efficacy, and a self-perceived high quality of life for individuals with disabilities above and beyond the basic benefits to cardiometabolic fitness. When taken together, the promotion of health, disability rights, and social integration through sports has the power to transform the lives of those who participate and to further stimulate the expansion of opportunities available to the next generation of athletes with disabilities. PM R 2012;4:851-856 THE PARALYMPIC MOVEMENT: FOUNDING PRINCIPLES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS As rehabilitation specialists, our role in the promotion of function, independence, and self-autonomy for individuals with disabilities is held as the core of our mission and remains the impetus for our work on a day-to-day basis. Participation in sports, when used as a tool to promote health, quality of life, and social integration, is a universal cultural construct that crosses divisions of disability, age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Academi- cally, disability sports is defined as “sport that has been designed for or specifically practiced by athletes with disabilities.”[1] Although it is now commonly accepted that sports participation for individuals with disabilities is not only possible but also encouraged, this was not always the case. For much of history, sports participation for people with disabilities was all too often considered unrealistic or contraindicated. The history of disability sports can be traced back to as early as 1888 with the founding of the Sports Club for the Deaf in Berlin [2]. Several decades later, in the mid 1940s, the modern Paralympic Movement took root in Stoke Mandeville, England [3]. There, Sir Ludwig Guttmann, a neurologist by training and director of the National Spinal Injuries Unit, began to implement participation in sports as an innovative means of rehabilitation for patients with spinal cord injury [4]. Although the use of sports to enhance rehabilitative outcomes was unconventional at the time, the concept rapidly gathered traction. The first Stoke Mandeville Games took place in 1948 with 16 participants competing on teams from 2 rehabilitation facilities in England. Only 3 years later, in 1951, 126 patients from 11 hospitals gathered to compete in 4 sports: archery, netball, javelin, and snooker (a cue sport akin to billiards) [5]. In 1952, international participation was garnered because athletes competing in the Stoke Mandeville Games were selected to represent their countries of origin as opposed to their rehabilitation facility. With the growth of the Stoke C.B. Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hos- pital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA Disclosures related to this publication: none. Disclosures outside this publication: travel/ accommodations/meeting expenses, Interna- tional Paralympic Committee S.E.W. University of Utah Orthopaedic Center, 590 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, UT 84108. Address correspondence to: S.E.W.; e-mail: stuart.willick@hsc.utah.edu Disclosures related to this publication: none. Disclosures outside this publication: travel/ accommodations/meeting expenses, Interna- tional Paralympic Committee PM&R © 2012 by the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 1934-1482/12/$36.00 Vol. 4, 851-856, November 2012 Printed in U.S.A. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pmrj.2012.08.015 851