With the Paralympic Games underway, fans will be hoping that Paris 2024 can pick up right where the Olympics left off.
The likes of archery, athletics, judo and powerlifting will all feature in the French capital as Team GB’s array of athletes hope to recreate their hugely impressive performance from three years ago.
Determining whether an athlete is eligible to compete in certain events, each sport has its own set of classifications, usually focusing on at least one of the following 10 eligible impairments: impaired muscle power, impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency, leg length difference, short stature, muscle tension, uncoordinated movement, involuntary movements, vision impairment, intellectual impairment.
If an athlete has one or more of these, they can compete as a Paralympian, but then the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) will group competition into six disability categories, with not every sport allowing for every disability.
So, what are the disability categories used in the likes of swimming and cycling at the Paralympics?
The six disability categories at the Paralympics
The categories in which competitors with at least one of the eligible impairments are grouped into are:
Amputee: Athletes with a partial or total loss of at least one limb.
Cerebral Palsy: Athletes with non-progressive brain damage, including cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, stroke or similar conditions that can affect muscle control, balance and/or co-ordination.
Intellectual Disability: Athletes with significant impairment in intellectual functioning and associated limitations in adaptive behaviour.
Wheelchair: Athletes with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities that require them to compete in a wheelchair.
Visually Impaired: Athletes with visual impairment. This can be partial blindness (enough to be determined legally blind) to total blindness. The athlete and their sighted guides are considered a team and both can win medals.
Les Autres (Others): Athletes with a physical disability that does not fall strictly under one of the other five categories, such as dwarfism, multiple sclerosis or congenital deformities of the limbs.
Individual sports will then classify their own events further.
For example, rowing events will be split into three classes.
- PR1 includes rowers with minimal or no trunk function who primarily propel the boat through arm and shoulder function. These rowers have poor sitting balance, which requires them to be strapped to the boat/seat.
- PR2 will include rowers that have functional use of their arms and trunk but have weakness/absence of leg function to slide the seat.
- PR3 includes rowers with residual function in their legs which allows them to slide the seat. This class also includes athletes with a vision impairment.
Cycling paralympic classifications
Cycling at the Paralympics also has its own classification systems, including the C1-C5 classes.
C1-C5 relates to Parathletes who are able to use a standard bicycle with slight modifications to compete in the five sport classes.
The lower the number, the more severe the impairment, so athletes competing in C1 are those whose disabilities that most impact their cycling.
Dame Sarah Storey competes in the C5 category, having been born without a functioning left hand.
Other cycling classes include:
- Handcycle sport classes (H1-H5)
- Tricycle sport classes (T1, T2)
- Tandem sport classes (TB)
Swimming paralympic classifications
There are four impairment groups at the Paralympics – physical, visual, intellectual and hearing.
- S1-S10 (Physical impairment)
- S11-S13 (visual impairment)
- S14 (intellectual impairment)
- S15 (hearing impairment)
The S prefix is used to denote freestyle, butterfly and backstroke, SM is used for individual medley events and SB for breaststroke.
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