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| Feature | No.61 May 2011 |

Exclusive Arenas: The Paralympics and Olympics
Otto J. Schantz & Keith Gilbert

Introduction
On 13th December, 2006 the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted at the United Nations in New York, opened for signature on 30th March, 2007 and entered into force on 3rd May, 2008. The purpose of this Convention is “to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity” (United Nations, 2006, article 1, p.4). The general principles include, among others, the following points:
“(a) Respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy including the freedom to make one’s own choices, and independence of persons;
(b) Non-discrimination;
(c) Full and effective participation and inclusion in society;
(d) Respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity;
(e) Equality of opportunity;
(f) Accessibility;
(g) Equality between men and women;” (article 3, p.5)
By signing the Convention, State Parties “recognize the equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others, and shall take effective and appropriate measures to facilitate full enjoyment by persons with disabilities of this right and their full inclusion and participation in the community” (Article 19 p. 13). According to Article 30 (p.5), State Parties should take “appropriate” measures “to encourage and promote the participation, to the fullest extent possible, of persons with disabilities in mainstream sporting activities at all levels”.
On 10th May, 2011 the 100th State Party ratified the Convention (United Nations, 2011) and 148 countries have since signed it. The number of ratifications and signatures indicate clearly that there is a worldwide political will to guarantee all people with disabilities full inclusion in our societies.
On the occasion of the Bejing Olympic Games in 2008, you could read in the “News Stories” of the United Nations that:
“persons with disabilities have the right to participate in sporting and recreational activities at all levels; organizing and participating in sports; receiving the necessary instruction, training and resources; and accessing sporting, recreational and leisure venues. In addition, children and youth with disabilities have the right to play and the right to equal access in sporting, recreational and leisure activities, including those within the educational system” (United Nations, 2008).
The same article highlighted that “Paralympic athletes embody the highest ideals of humanity - they challenge the boundaries set by society and aim to develop and maximize their potential as world-class athletes” (United Nations, 2008).
However, central to this article are the following questions: Is the Paralympic movement really a body which emphasises inclusion? And does it really foster the “highest ideals of humanity” as mentioned in the United Nations statement quoted above?
Our purpose now is to indicate that despite political will, and despite all the efforts to create an inclusive society, sport per se is still a field where discrimination against people with disabilities persists. When we analyse disability and sport, there appears to be a contradiction between the common ethical and civilisation discourses of the 21st century and the discourses in today’s sport which rely widely on the 19th century sports model. We will try to focus here on these contradictions and to deconstruct the traditional sport discourses. At the end, we will propose strategies for change and possible accommodations in the fields of sport and physical education in order to improve the application of human rights for people with disabilities in the sporting arenas, where the necessity to exclude seems to be still taken for granted.
Most of the Olympic sports of today derive directly from modern sports that were construed in the time period between the early 18th and the late 19th centuries as record seeking, institutionalised and highly formalised activities (Guttmann, 1978, p. 57). They can be seen as cultural practices that took their essential forms in social contexts and are mostly characterised by male values, which were dominant in a time period of colonial conquests, rising nationalism, armed conflicts and industrial capitalism. Sports were designed in this period to promote toughness, efficiency, power, ability and competitiveness of young men in order to prepare them for military service and the struggles of life. There was no place for the weak, for women, the elderly or for people with disabilities. Thus, many of our sports of today are codified traditional games and exercises, which as previously mentioned, had served to prepare man for war and hunting.
Interestingly, sport in pre-modern times was not prone to classify human bodies – instead, it used proxy variables like social class or family status (married vs. unmarried) to regulate participation or to build teams. It is modern sport that has started to categorise bodies according to their morphology and ability. Classifications and handicaps were introduced into sport rules in order to guarantee an exciting competition with an open outcome, and to fulfill the myth of equal chances for all competitors.
Normalising statistics and modern sport were born in the same era(1) . Indeed, codified sport has become a form of bio-power to discipline and to normalise the body. It uses all the instruments of a disciplining power described by Michel Foucault (1975, p.215) as ‘it compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes and excludes’. It is clear then that as male values and ableist standards are still dominant in most sports today, those groups in society who do not fit these value structures are still marginalised.
In 1904, at the Olympic Games in St Louis, in an era when the categorising and excluding discourses focused on gender and race or ethnicity and when the instruments of categorizing were rather rudimentary, George Eiser, a gymnast from the USA, won three gold medals on the parallel bars, in rope climbing and in vaulting the long horse. In addition, he finished second in the all-round event and finally won a bronze medal on the horizontal bars. To win six medals at the Olympic Games is certainly an extraordinary performance; the most astonishing aspect of this success however, is that George Eiser competed with the handicap of a wooden leg.
Normalising Exclusion
Exclusion and marginalisation of individuals is inherent in sports today but this is not a new phenomenon. At the already mentioned Olympic Games in St Louis, women, except six who competed in archery, were excluded. Indeed, special competitions, called the “Anthropology Days” were organised for the “savages” to show the superiority of athletes from Western civilised cultures (Brownell, 2008). Particularities or impairments of the body, however, were at this time still considered as curiosities of nature (lusus naturae) before becoming categorised by the medical discourse as abnormal, as pathologies or disabilities. In North America, it was in the 1930s that “the medical profession had gained the authority to present people with physical and mental differences to the public in terms of their choosing, and these were the terms of pathology” (Bogdan, 1988).
When sport gradually became more and more professionalised and commercialized, the time of laughter and insouciance was clearly over for many participants. In order to fulfill the myth of equality of chances, normalising, homogenising, comparing and hierarchising became a serious business in the sporting arena. People with disabilities were consigned to rehabilitation activities and the medical paradigm started to dominate the field of disabled sports. Incredible as it seems, we feel that even today, the disabling pathological perspective is prevalent in sport.
Due to the progress of biotechnologies, techniques and instruments of disciplining the body have became increasingly refined. Women who had struggled for a long period to be accepted in the field of sport and who were still excluded from some sports had, and again today, have to undergo increasingly refined tests to prove that they belong to the homogenised and normalised category of the ‘female sex’.(2) People originally classified as unable to participate in mainstream sport have to face biomechanical tests if they want to compete with able-bodied athletes and must prove that they are not “too able” as it was shown in the case of Oscar Pistorius, who is called “the fastest man on no legs”.(3)
Every act of categorising includes, and at the same time, excludes. We argue that classifications or rankings based on proxy variables like age, gender or ability/disability are political acts that lead to segregation and that are often discriminatory and disempowering to the individual. Indeed, the commonly advanced argument in order to justify the creation of a special category for people with disabilities is a naturalising one: Due to their impairments, “these people” are considered not to be able to practice sport together or along with the “normal” athletes, as sport demands natural, sports specific abilities. For example, the Human Rights Commission of the Australian Government considers that the Disability Discrimination Act “makes discrimination unlawful in sport except if

- a person is not reasonably capable of performing actions reasonably required in relation to the sporting activity; or
- people who participate in the sporting activity are selected by a method which is reasonable on the basis of relevant skills and abilities; or
- a sporting activity is conducted only for persons who have a particular disability and the person does not have that disability” (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2009).

These exceptions sound reasonable and understandable; however, in practice this kind of discourse, as it explicitly addresses people with disabilities, contributes to cement the existing categories. This discourse suggests that sport is something immutable, and that people have to adapt to the sport, and if they are not able to develop the required capacities and skills, they have to stay on the margins or practice sports in a special category, i.e. ‘the category of disabled sports’ which is itself internally differentiated by multiple classifications. The third exception formulated by the Australian Human Rights Commission does not refer to a sport specific variable, for example, a special ability or capacity, but uses the overall proxy variable “disability”. In using this identity based category, this “exception” builds barriers against reversed integration in the field of sport in general.
It is evident that many people, even if they are part of the “able bodied” category, do not meet the required skills for certain activities, but luckily today’s sport offers an abundant variety of sporting events and disciplines. Almost everybody can find a sport and a modality of activity according to their abilities, capacities and morphology. Before excluding people from sport, we should render sport even more open to all kind of human embodiments and make it accessible as far as possible. Unfortunately, we don’t often use the inclusive potential of physical activities. Instead of accommodating these activities to the people willing to exercise and to compete, we try to adapt people to the activities, or, at most, adapt or create some activities for a special population.
Separate Games = Separate People
Even sport organisations, which claim to promote the lofty ideals of fair-play, mutual understanding and equality of opportunity, accept or even contribute significantly to the exclusion of athletes with disabilities. Indeed, different actions and strategies of the International Olympic Committee, which claims in its charter there should be promotion of “sport without discrimination of any kind” (IOC, 2007, p.11) can be considered as discriminatory against athletes with disabilities. From 1984 to 2004, wheelchair competitions were included in the program of the Olympic Games, without however giving full medal status to these events. Certain athletes and commentators considered this as a discriminatory practice towards the athletes with disabilities. Up until the 1990s, there was a strong faction of people within the Paralympic movement who struggled for the right to be integrated into the Olympic movement. However, finally the powerful IOC had the more convincing arguments.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC), dependent largely on the money of its big brother, seduced by the illusion of big profits and the hypocritical discourse on the Paralympic Games as “Parallel Games” has accepted that its athletes are classified definitely in the category of the disabled, and as such excluded from the Olympic Games. Interestingly, Corrigan Paton, Holt and Hardin (2010, p.303) argue that this “farce” of considering the Paralympics as parallel “reinforces an unjust but seemingly natural body hierarchy”.
At the same time, the IPC itself, by substituting the traditional disabled sport that celebrated equality and communal participation over performance and by embracing the logic of high-performance sport of the Olympic movement, excludes many athletes of the disabled community who do not fit into the new commercial agenda (Howe and Jones, 2006; Schantz and Gilbert, 2011).
We feel strongly that classifying human beings on the basis of their abilities or disabilities can be seen as dehumanising, degrading and humiliating. According to the anthropologist and former Paralympian David Howe, the process of classification “is an alienating experience, as each time a different set of individuals determines whether your body fits into the textbook of carnal typology that is acceptable to those who govern the particular element of Paralympic sport that the athletes wish to be a part” (Howe, 2008, p.71). It can be argued that classification is a crude form of governmentality of the athlete’s bodies and a technology of dominance over the body (cf. Foucault, 1982; 2001a; 2001c). The fact that the IPC accepts and promotes the separated “parallel” Games can be seen as highly problematic, because identity-based movements risk becoming “contested as exclusionary and internally hierarchical” (Tremain, 2006, p.194). The athletes with disabilities should refuse subjecting identity and individuality, not claim it or get trapped in it (Tremain, 2006; Foucault, 2001b; Sen, 2006).
The constellation of spectacular Olympic Games, with the elite able-bodied athletes on the one hand and the second class Paralympic Games on the other hand, is neither empowering for those athletes who consider themselves as high-performance athletes first, nor for those who want to enjoy practicing sports and competitions within the community of people with disabilities.
Sport can surely contribute to the empowerment of certain successful individual athletes and can help them to leave the “disability ghetto” (Page, O’Connor and Peterson, 2001; Huang and Brittain, 2006). However, these sportsmen and women are a very small fringe of the community of people with disabilities; they are the lucky ‘super-crips’ and it is only a small percentage of the persons with disabilities who are likely to take them as role models. The existence of the exceedingly mediated and celebrated Olympic Games on the one hand and the more or lesser known Paralympic Games on the other, does not contribute to the empowerment of the community of persons with disabilities. This is supported by a recent unpublished study in Stratford, the United Kingdom, (home of the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics) where the authors asked 50 of the local community if they knew what the Paralympic Games were all about and when they were being held. The answer to all questions from all respondents was in the negative. ‘They had no clue about the Paralympics’. We realise that this is only a small sample but we expect many more individuals to also have little or no knowledge of the Paralympic Games. Whose fault is this?
In this manner, two separate Games risk reinforcing the separation between the able bodied athletes and those with disabilities; or, as Goggin and Newell (2005, p.81) argue, “…..the existence of a special event for people identified as having disability is a painful reminder of inequity and injustice, and its presence perpetuates the discourse of ‘special needs’ and ‘special events’“.
Although the Paralympic movement tries hard to increase its symbolic capital in order to change it into economic capital, it will probably never reach the prestige of the Olympic movement. The product the IOC is selling fits the demand of the average sport consumers: it trades a world-wide mediated mega event that presents enchanting stories and values, as well as images of young beautiful, powerful, gracious and healthy athletes; it sells the myth of a sport event capable of creating a peaceful and better world. In comparison, the Paralympic movement appears to be a communal movement, which is united by a common identity, a common culture based on disability; even though it seeks to be an elite sport organisation focusing on sporting excellence. The product the IPC tries to sell is quite different from that of the IOC and sport consumers are much less eager to buy it. Indeed, for the average consumer, sport is generally associated with the notions of health, vitality, ability, power and independence, while disability is stereotypically related to the labels of illness, invalidity, disability, helplessness and dependence. The territory of the Olympic sportsmen and women is the stadium, but the territory of the people with disabilities is the special rehabilitation institution or the hospital (Goffman, 1963). Unfortunately, this kind of labeling is still alive in many people’s minds. This is certainly the most important reason why sponsors are reluctant to engage in disabled sport, as they don’t want to be associated with such negative labeling. For similar and connected reasons, the media coverage of the Paralympic Games is rather poor compared to the Olympic Games, even though in certain countries it has largely improved during the last decade (Schantz and Gilbert, 2001).
The attitudes towards the Paralympic movement are often ambiguous: on the one hand, people admire the will power and the prowess of Paralympians and consider them as heroes overcoming their fate; on the other, they feel pity for these sportsmen and women. While the Olympic Games are a kind of social Darwinism in the sports arena, promoting the survival of the fittest, the Paralympic games have evolved in a space of liminality (Murphy, 1987) lodged firmly between being a tough and bellicose sport spectacle and a charity event and always in second position behind the Olympic Games
By disseminating and perpetuating standards of physical beauty, fitness and absolute performance, the Olympics contribute to the exclusion of persons with disabilities, thus promoting an ableist world view. The Olympic Movement thoroughly transformed its symbolic power, which is due to its mythical and idealistic narratives as well as its images of embodied excellence and its worldwide popularity and appeal as a showcase of national interests developing into financial and political power. The IOC is now the most powerful sports organisations in the world, which is fawned over by the presidents of such powerful states as the United States of America and Russia. The Paralympic movement is now almost completely dependent of and reliant on the IOC (the OCOG, stadia, volunteers, technical experts, financial support and marketing). It does not fit the glamorous and elitist image of the Olympics; sometimes one gets the impression that it just serves as a means to cultivate the charity image and reassure the social conscience of the IOC. The Olympics and Paralympics are thus in a binary opposition, which is hierarchical in nature. Indeed, as long as sporting performance is only recognised in absolute and quantitative terms, reflecting the mainstream philosophy of our western competitive world, all people who are part of other than the very top category, will automatically be marginalised. Sportsmen, and, to an even greater extent, sportswomen in the disabled category will continue to be positioned as second class athletes and at the bottom of the world’s physical elite scale. According to Peter Kell and collaborators, they will be the losers in a sports world based on “free enterprise” that “contradicts the importance of the state structures to support the needs of the disabled where the market forces repeatedly fail them in all spheres of life” (Kell, Kell and Price, 2008, p.165).
As long as professional or elite sport does not radically change its logic of “faster, higher and stronger”, it will be utopian to think that by “becoming ‘Parallel Olympians’, athletes with disabilities can try to get away from the oxymoron that ‘disabled athletes’ may be perceived as and be allowed to associate themselves with a movement that sells itself as being about sport as a vehicle for ‘peace and understanding as well as sport of the very highest level” (Brittain, 2010, p.93). The standards of play and performances in Paralympic sports will always be measured against the ‘norms’ of Olympic sports. Without fundamental change, there will always be the glamorous category of the Olympic Games for the very best and then the lower category for the brave Paralympians who have overcome their “terrible fate”. In our sport frenetic society, physical prowess often becomes an indicator of a person’s value, not only in sport but also in other domains. By separating elite sport in a category for able-bodied and disabled sport, we risk perpetuating the image of the less valuable disabled and as such, to disempower the whole community of individuals with disabilities. However, exclusion seems to be taken for granted in the domain of top level sport. Will it one day be possible to demolish one of the last bastions of unequal treatment of persons with disabilities by rendering sport accessible for inclusive competitions at all levels?
Concluding statements
Top level athletes with disabilities, like the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the “fastest man on no legs”, need accessibility to able-bodied sport instead of discrimination and exclusion. By accommodating and changing the rules and/or the equipment, some sports could be made accessible to athletes with disabilities (Schantz, 2001). New sports, which allow athletes with and without disabilities to compete side by side, should be included in the Olympic Program. One laudable example is the accommodation of the swimming events in Sydney 2000 Olympics, when an optic signal was added to the acoustical departure signal in order to allow fair competition for a participating swimmer with deafness. Indeed, why not consider the wheelchair just like the bicycle as sports equipment? Wheelchair sports could be included as a full medal sport, open for able-bodied athletes. Thus for example wheelchair basketball could become an exciting spectator sport in the Olympic program. The same could be done in the Winter Games with sled-skiing. There are different examples of sport which could easily be rendered accessible for people with disabilities, like powerlifting, shooting, archery, sailing or tandem cycling (Schantz, 2001).
To improve the accessibility of mainstream sport through accommodation and adaptation of sports is the only way to real inclusion without discrimination (Schantz, 2001). All kinds of categorising and the building of hierarchical, hegemonic structures thus lead to marginalisation in a sports model which values only the absolute best, the often quoted citius – altius – fortius. We argue that the fact of having two Games, one for the Olympians and one for the Paralympians, promotes an ableist viewpoint that considers the able-bodied as the norm of top level sports.
Sport organisations that present themselves as moral institutions, like the IOC that claims “to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” (IOC, 2007, p.11) should think about and experiment with new forms of inclusive sport activities. The IOC moved on this at the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore by augmenting the number of mixed events, like mixed relays in athletics, in order to improve the inclusion of women in sport. A next step could be to think about offering more inclusive events and/or to accommodate rules and techniques of some sports in order to make the Olympic Games more accessible for the so-called “athletes with disabilities” and to offer the possibility to practice sport at all levels “without discrimination of any kind” as it is stated in the IOC charter (2007, p.11).
Only by giving equal access to the Olympic Games for excellent athletes from the whole range of humankind will the IOC really fulfill its claim of universalism. We believe that the IOC can no longer exclude or discriminate against an important part of humanity and that the IPC should conserve and develop the Paralympic Games as a show case of the sporting culture for people with disabilities. It should develop the Paralympic Movement/Games as an alternative sports culture, which meets the needs of all people with disabilities, but keeps integration and inclusion as a main objective. It should try to go its own way, in collaboration with other sport organisations, but not try to copy the IOC. As a simple copy of the IOC, it will always be a second class sporting movement (Schantz, 2001).
Education in general, as well as physical education, should not, in our opinion, just describe, explain, prepare for and reproduce the existing world. Higher education institutions, schools and colleges that teach physical education should question our world, think about and test new possibilities in order to transform and change it into a better place to live for all. Physical education should emphasise new emancipating forms of physical activities, thereby challenging the old 19th century values of modern sports, which we hope will be obsolete in a future world, where solidarity should be more important to assure the survival of our species than competitiveness of the individual (Jacquard, 2004).
It would be a naturalistic fallacy to try to refute this point of view by arguing that we cannot change sport because we already fit into it and agree with its mainstream values such as power, violence, manliness, courage and competition; since, as humans, we are evolutionary products that cannot deny our origins as hunters, gatherers and warriors. Sport is indeed a socially constructed practice and hence, so are the categories used in sports. In our final statements, we believe that these practices need to be questioned persistently and acted upon permanently in order to follow the cultural evolution towards an inclusive and better society as it is reflected by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations.

Notes
(1) In 1809 Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777-1855)published in his monograph “Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium” different important statistical concepts, such as the method of least squares, the method of maximum likelihood, and the normal (Gaussian) distribution.
(2) See the case of Caster Semenya.
(3) Oscar Pistorius was accused of “technical doping” as he replaced his lacking legs by prostheses. Narrow minded scientist proved that the “Cheetah” prostheses gave him a mechanical and physiological advantage, and recommended not to admit him into Olympic competition. These arguments are narrow minded, as they did not take into consideration the broader structure of his sporting performance and even less the philosophical or ethical aspects of the question. Almost all sporting performances are complex and determined by different factors. In the 400m sprint it is not exclusively the speed in the last 100m which will decide the overall performance. The capacity to accelerate at the departure and the ability to run in the curves are other, for Pistorius disadvantageous, and factors which influence the performance and outcome. As long as his overall performance allows an interesting competition with an open outcome, why should we exclude him from competing with sporting partners at his level?
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Contact
Prof. Dr. Otto J. Schantz
University of Koblenz
Koblenz, Germany
Email: Schantz@uni-koblenz.de
Prof. Dr. Keith Gilbert
University of East London
School of Health and Biosciences
London, United Kingsom
Email: k.gilbert@uel.ac.uk

http://www.icsspe.org/