In 2024, Paris will not only organize the Olympic Games but also the Paralympic Games, reserved for athletes with disabilities. To maintain sporting fairness between all athletes, the IOC has set up a particular classification with rather unclear names such as T20, C1, S14 or even GBL. Here is a short guide to understand everything.
While the Paralympic Games, in a year’s time in Paris, bring together three main categories of disabilities – physical, visual, psychological – the classification aims to define which athletes are eligible for competitions, and to oppose athletes with identical characteristics or equivalent.
Since the disability categories are valid for all international competitions, it is not surprising that you have to master the language of Shakespeare to decipher the first indicator of a category: its letter.
In swimming? it’s the S of swimming. In cycling? the C of cycling. Behind the initials GBL? goalball, a discipline combining handball and bowling.
Other categories are represented by several letters. For example, track and field events take place either on the track (the T of track) or in the central area (the F of field).
In some sports, the letters can also correspond to a particularity. In badminton, the WH1 event will refer to athletes in wheelchairs. In cycling, there are also categories related to the type of bike used. Thus categories H1 to H5 include riders on handbikes, or hand bikes, during road events.
As for swimming, a second letter can follow the S and corresponds to a type of stroke: B for breaststroke or breaststroke, M for multistroke or medley.
At the last Para-Athletics World Championships in Paris, no less than 31 gold medals were awarded for the only 100m event, women and men combined. At the Games, athletes are divided into six categories (1-6): from visual impairment (1) to absence of a limb (6) to intellectual disability (2).
To this first number is attached a second, linked to the degree of the handicap, the 1 being the strongest. Thus, the French Paralympic 400m champion (2016) Nantenin Keita – visually impaired – competes in the T13 category while her teammate Trésor Makunda – blind and accompanied by a guide – is in the T11 category.
The meaning of the numbers may also be slightly different. In swimming (butterfly, backstroke, crawl), categories S1 to S10 correspond to a physical handicap (but S1 is stronger than S10), S11 to S13 to a visual handicap and S14 to an intellectual handicap.
While the number of events in para-athletics can sometimes make you dizzy, the same is not true for each of the 22 Paralympic sports. Thus goalball, para-judo and blind football are reserved only for visually impaired athletes.
For its part, para-weightlifting brings together several forms of handicaps as long as the athletes can use their arms (bench press test). They are categorized by weight, just like in taekwondo. As for team sports such as wheelchair rugby, sitting volleyball or wheelchair basketball, the teams are composed in order to have a balanced workforce with more or less severe handicaps.
Finally, some sports have their specific terms. We will talk about grade from 1 to 5 for para-riding, CAT A and B for wheelchair fencing, Quad – all limbs affected – or Open – lower limbs – in wheelchair tennis, and Open and W1 category in archery, the second grouping archers with a greater handicap and requiring a chair.