The Paralympics are supposed to be fair and inclusive, but often fail to be

The Summer Paralympic Games in Paris are now coming to a close. Over the past 10 days, more than 1,000 athletes with disabilities competed in 164 different disciplines. Inspiring stories about overcoming adversity and celebrating diversity filled sports pages covering the event.

Indeed, the Paralympics, which are held every four years, promise athletes with disabilities a platform where dedication and skill, not their physical conditions, define their potential for victory. They are supposed to guarantee fairness and inclusivity.

Yet, when I naively embarked on my journey as a Paralympic athlete, I was shocked to find a system that often accentuates rather than diminishes disabilities. While the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) touts advancements in athlete inclusion and competitive integrity, many athletes face a different reality.

A flawed foundation

When the Paralympics started in 1960, they focused on catering mainly to World War II veterans with specific injuries. Competitions were organised by amputation type or wheelchair use. These categories are still largely in use 70 years later, with athletes being grouped based on their impairments.

The goal is to create a level playing field by ensuring that athletes compete against others with similar ability levels. However, this classification system does not accommodate the wide spectrum of disabilities now present in the games.

I personally experienced the system’s inadequacies when officials, unable to classify my unique set of impairments, arbitrarily placed me in a category originally intended for athletes with below-knee amputations, despite the fact that I have both of my legs.

This is because my sport does not have a classification category for athletes with impairment in all four limbs, which is my circumstance. I was told that the IPC had not anticipated someone with my level of disability wanting to compete.

While my ill-fitting classification did not ultimately prevent me from excelling in my discipline, the same cannot be said for many others.

This broken system leads to unfair competition. Notably, chronic illnesses and complex disabilities, which are increasingly common today, are routinely oversimplified during classification.

Competitors with these conditions simply do not fit into the existing system that the IPC has put in place and continues to stand behind. Instead, their disabilities are boiled down to the most similar amputation or spinal cord injury.

Furthermore, in some Paralympic sports, athletes with different impairments are grouped together. This is the case in track and field and skiing. This can result in fundamentally unfair competitions, like a skier missing a hand competing against one missing a leg. In the most extreme cases, athletes with full vision compete against those who are blind.

To address this imbalance, the IPC adjusts competition times based on classification categories, hoping to create fairness. However, this method is far from effective. It is like trying to even out a race between athletes by changing their finish times after the fact – it does not truly reflect their abilities or the challenges they face. The current system, despite likely good intentions, fails to provide a genuinely level playing field for anyone involved.

As a result, an athlete with a distinct advantage due to misclassification often emerges as the winner in competitions.

High stakes, abuse and silencing

Globally, the problem is exacerbated by the high stakes involved in Paralympic competition, including sponsorships and national pride. Since 2018, Paralympic medal payouts in the United States have increased

by up to 400 percent. With significant financial rewards at stake, the pressure to win leads some athletes to cheat. Unlike able-bodied sports where doping is the primary issue, Paralympic athletes can manipulate the classification system by exaggerating or faking their disabilities.

While the majority of athletes do not exploit the system and are deserving of their accolades, cheating does occur. For example, Indian discus thrower Vinod Kumar, who won a bronze medal in the 2021 Summer Paralympics, was later disqualified for intentionally misrepresenting his impairments to compete against more severely disabled athletes. In 2017, British sprinter Bethany Woodward returned her silver medal from a team event, believing it was unfairly earned because a teammate had cheated classification.

These known cases are just the tip of the iceberg; many incidents of cheating go uncontested. Prominent athletes have repeatedly and publicly criticised the classification system, but to no avail.