A critical remark often heard from people who are against competition for the disabled is that this competition is little meaningful. Their argumentation is that competitors are in-comparable because the same limitation can have different consequences through which the going in position for each athlete will be different. Trying to prevent this with a refined classification per kind of limitation one ends up, still according to the people against these compe-titions, with very small groups even so small that every competitor is, in advance, sure about his/her medal
Above remarks are not new en used to be rightly. At the start of compe-tition for people with a disability one had the belief that the classification could not be to refine to enable equal change for everybody. The classifi-cation was done by grouping athletes per limitation and more over abilities they still had. For every bit of limb somebody missed, so to say, there was a separate class created. In the classes which resulted from this way of thinking the number of competitors was so small that indeed no meaningful competition existed. This resulted in the opinion that sport competition for disabled people was little attractive and more over had little credibility.
The International Paralympic Organization declares that they changed that since the Para-lympics of Seoul, Barcelona and Atlanta.
Their classification is now done based on the physical possibilities of the athlete in a cer-tain sport. If this way of classification is executed carefully it will result in groups combining more classes of limitations in a way that every group has a meaningful competition.
The way of working at this moment is, that every competitor gets a phy-sical examination. This examination pays particular attention to determine the minimum level of limitation and the athletes are classified in medical classes. In addition the athletes gets a functional classification for sport in which they compete. This functional classification is determined related to the sport technical demands set the nature of that particular sport.
This way the groups become bigger than when the are done on medical classification only. More medical classes can form together one functional class. In some sports this even brought further down. In power lifting and judo for instance the classification is done by weight categories indepen-dent of the medical classification.
What the IPC does not mention is that in judo only the visual impaired are allowed to compete in judo. The only adjustments they made is that the competition is no longer divide in B class. No big change for the VI judokas who already compete in the main-stream judo competition to classify them for the Olympic Games.
Summarizing you could say classification seems to appear for equal sport competition, but is this true?
Dividing people in groups is as old as mankind, we defied people in all kinds of groups we cal this differentiation what is the discernment of qualities and recognition of the differ-ences between people.
Discrimination how ever is the prejudicial treatment of different groups of people based on certain characteristics. Discrimination on grounds such as race or religion, is generally illegal in most Western democracies, while discriminating between people on the grounds of merit is usually lawful. When unlawful discrimination takes place, it is often described as discrimi-nation against a person or group of people.
The international Olympic committee has for several years the policy that athletes with an intellectual disability cannot compete in their sport orga-nization. They declared that they are unable to classify athletes with an intellectual disability. In this matter IPC takes no responsibility nor do they seek any solution of this dilemma while they proclaim to be a sport organization for all disabled athletes.
Under this conditions we must ask if sport classification on a medical base is useful, fair or an other utopia??
Ben van der Eng
