Disability & Sports Blog - Kashmira Sidhwa

Looking back on the first day of class and receiving the instructions for our first blog, I was not as knowledgeable about disabled sports as I am now, after being almost done with this course. When I first started this class, if someone were to ask me, "what do you think of when you hear disabled sports?" and I would have to say that the first thing that came to my mind was individuals who were paralyzed and needed wheelchairs that played sports. I did know about several different disabilities, but people in wheelchairs was the first image that came to my mind. Now, flash forward to a few months later, and I now know the correct way to address these athletes as: "individuals with disabilities," and not as "disabled people." There is so much new information that I have learnt about the Paralympics that I never would have even thought of if I had not taken this class. For example, the different categories of disabilities that there are in order to be able t

                                             Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Do you have a family or friend that wants to feel included and play on a local sports team but cannot find one that accepts individuals with a hearing or visual impairment? Well, you found the right place! A lot of sports only account for physical disabilities such as amputees, paralyzed people, and more. There are tons of sports that, with a hearing or visual impairment, you cannot, or it is very difficult, to participate in. In the Paralympics, there are several sports that are able to be played by these types of individuals, such as goalball, rowing, and swimming for visual impairments and track events for those with hearing impairments. There are several ways that these sports make it easier and more accessible for the athletes to feel comfortable and safe while participating in the sport. For example, people with hearing impairments who compete in track events are not able to hear the gun fire that marks

~Special Olympics Mission~ "The mission of Special Olympics is to provide year-round sports training and athletic competition in a variety of Olympic-type sports for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, giving them continuing opportunities to develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, experience joy and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills and friendship with their families, other Special Olympics athletes and the community." (Special Olympics, 2023) Eunice Kennedy Shriver was the founder of Camp Shriver, a place with people with intellectual disabilities could feel included and participate in sports/activities, in the early 1960s at her Maryland farm, Timberlawn. Soon, everyone including the young camp counselors realized that these children were not difficult nor unteachable, but all they wanted to do was simply have fun (Special Olympics). Individuals with disabilities were tremendously being mistreated during the 1960s, being sent to institutions a

BRING HOME THE GOLD! What is one of the main reasons athletes go out for the Olympic or Paralympic Games? For their country. They want to be able to represent their home country and bring home the gold medal to them. Why represent another country that you are not from when you can show off where you are from and display pride in your homeland! The International Paralympic Committee made the executive decision in March of 2022 that athletes participating in the Paralympic Games who were from Russia or Belarus were not able to represent their own countries, but rather represent the Paralympic flag and the Paralympic anthem, to compete as neutral athletes/support personnel in the Games. In addition, they are also not allowed to have their country displayed anywhere on their attire nor, if and when, they win medals will those medals be counted towards their country but rather towards them as an individual (IPC Make Decisions Regarding RPC and NPC Belarus, 2022). Later in November of 2022,