Sports games for people with intellectual disabilities. Institutional analysis of an unusual international configuration

Abstract

Today, intellectually disabled athletes can participate in a variety of international sports competitions. For an athlete, access to one or another of these events is possible according to their level of sporting ability or their intellectual capacity, but also depends on their country and the extent to which it hosts International Sports movements. One option for those who have the greatest sporting achievements – and often the greatest intellectual capacity – is to be involved in the competitive circuit organized according to the pyramidal logic of traditional elite sports and in which the ultimate aim is participation in the Paralympic games, a greatly valued perspective that epitomizes a process of de-stigmatization of these athletes. Everyone can participate in an international sports event and ‘play at’ being champion by committing to the Special Olympics movement, which offers particular and non-selective sports games, but which does not command the same recognition or the eventual de-stigmatization.

Notes

1. This research was conducted in the framework of a scientific collaboration between the Santesih Laboratory of the University of Montpellier (EA 4614) and the ‘Study and Research’ section of the French Federation for Adapted Sport, with financial aid from the latter. The analyses presented in this paper do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the FFSA.

2. The ‘French centres’ are training and management mechanisms for top-level and promising athletes which can be organized in different ways depending on sports federations.

3. It is important to specify here that we are talking about multi-sport events because there are numerous other global sports events for each discipline, such as, for example, the world Paralympic athletics Championships.

4. The first decision as to the integration of this category of athletes into the Paralympic Games dates from 1989, when the IPC was founded.

5. Website specialolympics.org, section ‘Who Are Our Athletes?’

6. Website ‘www.su-ds.org/2016-trisome-games’, 1st May 2016.

7. Hope For Retarded Children. Eunice Kennedy. The Saturday Evening post, 22 September 1962.

8. Rosemary, the last secret of the Kennedys. Le Monde, 7 April 2009.

9. Initially called INAS-FMH, International Sports Federation for Persons with a Mental Handicap, the Federation was renamed INAS-FID, International Sports Federation for Persons with Intellectual Disability in 1994.

10. As we will develop below.

11. Debate BBC 1994 – ‘Disability for Dollars’. Online.

12. Indeed, when an athlete is already accepted as eligible by INAS for one sport but wishes to compete in another sport, they only have to fill in a simplified questionnaire. www.inas.org/member-services/eligibility-and-classification.

13. The specific categories for intellectual disability recognized by the IPC are: swimming classification S/SB14, athletics classification T20/F20, table tennis classification 11.

14. Document ‘SU-DS. Presentation’ is available on the website of the Federation.

15. Official letter of the IPC to DSISO, 28 April 2008.

16. Website IAADS, section ‘about us’, May 2016.

17. Facebook page of SU-DS, 26 February 2015 and 6 March 2015.

18. The official document of the presentation of the European Youth Paralympic Games, which dates from January 2015, clearly includes the « Down syndrome » category for each sport.

19. SU-DS. ‘registration pack’ for the Trisome Games 2016.

20. Indeed, a team of eight swimmers went to the world championship of the Down Syndrome International Swimming Organisation in 2014, and French ‘Trisomy 21’ teams have been created for table tennis and swimming (source: document produced by the FFSA following the world Championships of DSIDO, November 2014, Mexico).

21. On this subject, see Jobling, Jobling, and Fitzgerald 2008; the situation has not really changed since then because during the Paralympic Games of London in 2012, in the category ‘intellectual impairment’, there were one American, two Germans and three Canadians.