This collection of papers has arisen from the presentations and debates that took place during the international congress ‘Being disabled, becoming a champion’, held at the University of Lausanne on 12 and 13 November 2015.
First proposed by the Institute of Sports Sciences at the University of Lausanne, this congress became reality due to the cooperation of numerous partners, – academic, scientific or simply affiliated, – all of them directly concerned by issues that associate sport, disability and social change: the National Swiss Research Fund, the Social and Political Science Faculty and the Science-Society Interface of the University of Lausanne, the University Institute of the History of Medicine of the Canton of Vaud University Hospital Centre, the ‘Health, Education and Disability’ research laboratory (Santesih) of the University of Montpellier, the ‘Adaptation to tropical climate, exercise and society’ laboratory (ACTES) of the University of the West Indies and the Swiss Paraplegic Foundation.
This collection brings together 10 articles that can be grouped into three themes.
The first part consists in four articles examining different facets of the history of sports organizations set-up during the 1950s for athletes with motor or intellectual impairments. Starting from their inception, these papers retrace their history and focus upon how and by whom they were founded, have been managed and have developed over the course of more than 60 years.
The results of the first socio-historical research in Switzerland on sports movements for people with motor deficiencies, spearheaded by Nicolas Bancel, are presented initially. Julie Cornaton and her co-authors shed light on the origins and the double dynamic of the development between 1956 and 1968 of sports for the physically disabled in the Swiss Confederation, thereby enhancing our understanding of the current activities and orientations of the two large-scale Swiss organizations for ‘disabled sports’. While the first arose from medicine and the military, espousing a goal of rehabilitation governed by a hygienic and medical conception of physical activity, the second is built around a competitive model, and is resolutely focused on the practice of sport. In continuity with this study, the article by Stanislas Frenkiel underscores the important work of an unusual organization: association: the Swiss Paraplegics Association. Ever since the 1980s, given its human, financial and structural assets and its single-minded dedication to competitive sports, the SPA has been contributing to the training of a truly remarkable cadre of Swiss wheelchair racers.
Sylvain Ferez and his co-authors propose an analysis of the pronounced internal tensions in French sports movements for physically and visually disabled people between 1968 and 1973. They present various figures who put forward contrasting and at times incompatible views on what sport for the disabled should represent: functional re-education, simple care, international sports competition or else, perhaps, a spectacle. In France as well as Switzerland, these tensions permeate institutional structuring of sports for the disabled.
The paper by Elise Lantz and her co-author rounds off the first part by proposing an institutional analysis of the subsequent emergence (in the late 1960s) and striking development, previously hardly explored, of sports specifically targeting people with an intellectual impairment or psychic troubles. These athletes, who have recently become an integral part of the Paralympic movement, seem positioned at the heart of an institutional debate in which very different viewpoints of what constitutes mental disability, and the sports that can be legitimately practiced by mentally disabled people are pitted against one another. There are once again tensions, in this case between ‘the sporting model’, which is apparently desired by athletes who are disabled and is promoted by associations also led in part by disabled people, and a more hygiene-driven and re-educational model that aims at improvement of the health and social participation of people with disabilities, excluding competitive sports, and is implemented by associations organized ‘for the benefit of others’ but led by the able-bodied.
These different contributions generate a broader historical outlook on the nation-by-nation development of sports practices for people with disabilities by underscoring dialectic tension between several institutional models embodying competing visions (the hygienic and social model vs. the competitive model) and underlining the observable differences between Switzerland and France. Parallel study and analysis of the sports organizations’ respective processes of formation also show the centrality of controversy that more than occasionally ensued in both Switzerland and France with regard first to, the introduction of competitive practices, and second to the development of top-level sport. When examining these institutions, we may observe internal splits between ‘wheelchair athletes’ and ‘upright athletes’, and between ‘athletes with a motor disability’ and ‘intellectually disabled athletes’.
The second part of this collection consists in three articles that focus not on the organizations and associations managing sports practices for disabled people, but rather on the athletes themselves. Voices are given, turn by turn, to the top-level athletes in adapted sports interviewed by Yann Beldame, to the pioneers of wheelchair racing who invented a new discipline, off-road wheelchair racing (FTT), which they defined as a ‘mixing and sharing sport’, analyzed here by Eric Perera, and, lastly, to David Howe, a former Paralympic athlete who has become a researcher and a defender of specific sports practices. In this section, a close look is taken at the different meanings and modalities that the sports practices possess for the athletes themselves.
At the outset, sports practices for the disabled were most often designed by doctors, pedagogues or teachers with objectives related to re-education or rehabilitation. The meanings associated with these practices were ‘recovery’ of functional abilities or ‘catching up’ on previously lagging development; in either case, a return to the norm was desired. Today, however, the social and sporting environment of disabled athletes markedly differ from that of the 1950s and 1960s. They benefit from a highly significant development of the phenomenon of sports in Western societies, development that is integrally linked to a ‘change in disability’ that has its roots in the 1950s.
These social transformations, which are to some extent interdependent, have combined to create a socio-historical configuration that sanctions the emergence of sport for people of limited ability, whether it be motor, sensory or intellectual. This dynamic reminds us that historically we can observe, from the end of the nineteenth century on, a gradual enlargement of the public having access to sport, enlargement due to the combined attempts by different dominated groups (the working classes, women, the colonized …) to appropriate and redefine for themselves the codes and uses of sport. So-called disabled people are no exception to this; riding the wave of empowerment, different groups have quickly taken charge of the adaptations and associations needed for participation in sport. As Eric Perera and his co-authors show, the pioneering actors in sports innovation and in the acceptance of competitive models are most often persons who are themselves affected by limited ability and who, in making certain sports activities available to themselves and to their ‘disabled peers’ simultaneously define their meanings and modalities. And sport, particularly competitive sport, undermines the notion of ‘disabled person’ by creating the conditions for a change in the representation of disability. Social recognition and consideration of athletes with a disability is asserted, supporting them as in their personal trajectories and leading them to positively engage in multiple roles, functions and social spaces that they were formerly denied.
The third and last part are entitled ‘different bodies, modified bodies, modular bodies’. With three different papers, it interrogates on the way support for disabled people can modify the existing definitions and conceptions of the body, of disability, of what is human and of sports performance. Indeed, sport is premised on a biological and natural conception of human performance. How does the introduction of technology aimed at compensating for natural deficiency in the achievement of sports performance, such as wheelchairs and prostheses, affect sporting categories, if not the definition of sport itself? How can categorizations guarantee the ‘natural’ foundations of sport? Damien Issanchou and his co-authors propose a double analysis of the cases of Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya as emblematic examples of situations in which binary representations (disabled/ able-bodied, man/woman) have been destabilized. They examine the way sports institutions react when faced with categorical uncertainty and the unusual relation that sports institutions maintain with techno-scientific paradigms in order to ‘straighten out’ these different and at times modified bodies. Jérôme Goffette emphasizes the effect of fascination generated by prosthetic gear and the sports performances of the prosthetised body. Closing out these considerations of epistemological and ethical issues, Johann Roduit and Roman Gaehwiler question the meaning of sports performance, the improvements endlessly pursued, and even the identity of sport itself. Is sport an activity in which humans confront one another? If so, how are we to define the limits of the human in a twenty-first century that countenances the development of a man-machine technical hybrid? The different contributions to this special collection detail some facets of our shared history and thereby elucidate the interwoven relations between sport, society and disability, from the 1950s to the present. From the beginning of sports for the physically or intellectually disabled, which were associated with the military and medical spheres and with functional re-education, through the development of mechanisms and social organizations initially designed to render sports activities accessible to the disabled, and only subsequently to produce Paralympic champions, we arrive at today’s space for sports practice, space that generates social controversies on the legitimacy of the biotechnical improvement of humans. From compensation for bodily deficiency to rehabilitation of people affected by disability, followed by their social integration and valuation, the history of the social uses of sport for so-called disabled people during the second half of the twentieth century is full of object lessons.
Today, the different sports practiced by people with disabilities, in particularly the champions who present certain disabilities but who in the final analysis are no longer completely disabled and are at times even characterized as ‘advantaged’ or ‘too-abled’, – reveals itself as a media-conscious platform for the ideology of bio-technical progress.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.