Ipc To Allow Intellectual Disabilities
The International Paralympic Committee has voted to allow athletes with intellectual disabilities to once again take part in the Games beginning with London 2012.
Such athletes had been banned since it was found that most of Spain’s intellectual disability basketball team at the 2000 Sydney Paralympics were not disabled.
As a result, ‘sports intelligence’ tests will form part of the new, more rigorous classification process.
Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, stated: ‘I’ve been involved in this campaign for the last four years so I know it wasn’t a simple decision.
‘But nobody who’s been at the Special Olympics would doubt that its competitors are every bit as committed as the Paralympians.’
A limited number of sports, including athletics and swimming, will now be included in the 2012 programme in London.
Intellectual disability athletes were barred from competing at both the Athens Games in 2004 and Beijing in 2008 following the scandal surrounding the Spanish team, but moves to welcome them back to the Paralympic fold have been in progress for some time.
The failure of a screening process to detect the absence of intellectual disability in several Spanish basketball players was extremely embarrassing for Paralympic organisers.
October’s IPC European Swimming Championships in Iceland, at which Britain won seven gold medals, marked the first IPC-run event where intellectual disability athletes were allowed to compete again.
The International Sports Federation for Persons with an Intellectual Disability (Inas-Fid) has been working with the IPC on the matter.
The two organisations jointly proposed a motion which stated the criteria for reintroducing athletes with an intellectual disability to the Paralympic Games had been met.
Accurate classification, vital to all forms of disability sport, had been highlighted as a prerequisite for the return of intellectual disability athletes to Paralympic competition.
Under the IPC’s new plans, an eligibility committee established by Inas-Fid will review an athlete’s medical file and, if they are deemed eligible, issue a letter to the athlete which allows them to proceed to the next step of the classification process.
A separate panel appointed by the relevant sport’s governing body then tests the athlete on-site ahead of an event, focusing on what the IPC calls ‘sports intelligence’, including tests relevant to that sport.
The athlete’s scores in those tests will be compared to ‘minimal disability scores’ in that sport, with the athlete appropriately classified as a result.
However, the IPC cautioned that ‘as of this autumn, no sport-specific minimal disability scores are available yet.
‘This requires the full analysis of all data collected from the 2009 Inas-Fid Global Games and other competitions, and it is expected that criteria will be made available mid-2010.’
