Challenge Magazine Fall 2007

Perspective DS/USA News Keep Your Skin Healthy During the Cold Weather Season Snow Skiing Resources The Tranquil Sport of Adaptive Snowshoeing Remembering and Celebrating 40 Years of Disabled Sports WWDSP Articles Marketplace

40 Years of Progress for Disabled Sports
 
This past 40 years has been an amazing ride for disability sports in the USA. I am lucky to have been along on that ride for 37 of those 40 years. Even though the “progress” in disability sports has seemed at times to be excruciatingly slow, looking back it is amazing how far we have come.

Back then we had a few significant sports to look to. Wheelchair basketball and track and field were fairly well established, most started by the Paralyzed Veterans of America after WWII. Disabled Sports USA had just started as an organization and was organizing a ski program for amputees from the Vietnam War. That is how early organizers like Doug Pringle, Ben Allen, Dan McPherson, working for founder Jim Winthers, a WWII veteran, started the program. I was hit in Vietnam in 1969 and became one of the early students and then, like so many others, a volunteer for 12 years.

But the scope of the progress can be measured as revolutionary in almost every way. Many of these developments can be credited to people and organizations that are or have been active in Disabled Sports USA, but also in other sports organizations.

New methods of teaching adaptive sports spread through snow skiing and now snowboarding, water skiing, sailing, scuba, basketball, volleyball (sitting and standing), track and field, horseback riding, cycling, golf, shooting, fishing, and even rock climbing! The big change here is that the “mainstream” organizations, like Professional Ski Instructors of America, US Tennis, US Sailing, US Water Skiing, US Kayaking and Canoeing, USA Volleyball, USA Track & Field, and PADI (scuba certification) adopted the disability sports and started to train their coaches in the adaptations specific to their sport.

Concurrent with this was the development of adaptive sports equipment using the latest high tech space age materials and suspension equipment borrowed from high performance sports like motocross biking. This included mono and bi skis which turned on precision suspensions so that now a person with no use of their legs could scream down a mountain at speeds in excess of 60 mph!

In summer sports, an amputee can learn to water ski in 45 seconds using a boom bar off the side of a racing boat and a person with no legs or no use of their legs can slalom race and go off jumps in a Kan Ski.

Sailing seats and other adaptations helped make that sport accessible. Disabled sailors now regularly compete in nondisabled sailing competitions in various boat classes. Handcycles, three-wheeled cycles, special foot and arm adaptations, and tandem bikes made cycling accessible to almost anyone with a disability including totally blind, triple amputees and partial quadriplegics.Scuba developed an entire range of special webbed gloves, fins for feet, and special foot protections to make that sport accessible. We have now certified over 30 Wounded Warriors with various disabilities in this sport. USA Volleyball and US Tennis adopted rule changes which opened up competition in these sports along with specially designed, quick turning, lightweight wheelchairs.

Forty years ago, who would have thought the paraplegic could race at 60 mph down a ski slope, that an above knee amputee could get air and 360 degrees on a snowboard; that a partial quadriplegic could ski down an intermediate ski slope. Who would have thought 40 years ago that a person could push a lightweight racing wheelchair through a 26 mile marathon in less than 1 hour 30 minutes, nearly forty minutes faster than the fastest two legger.

Now with all of these developments, we have the following extraordinary achievements. Two amputees (including one with two leg amputations) and a blind person have climbed Mount Everest and just about every one of the tallest peaks in each of the seven continents. A paraplegic with no use of his legs has climbed the highest sheer granite face in North America, Yosemite’s El Capitan, not just once but twice! Others have followed.

The fastest double leg amputee is now threatening to qualify for the Olympics in Beijing with times that would have enabled him to medal in earlier Olympics. Wheelchair tennis championships are played at Forest Hills. Sit volleyball is part of USA Volleyball National Championships. Amputee cyclists are racing in Category II (second highest category for nondisabled) US Cycling races and amputee, paraplegic and blind cyclists appear in cycling competitions regularly. A double leg amputee can parachute out of an airplane at thousands of feet and land within 10 feet of his target. Wheelchair racers have literally wheeled around the world on awareness missions. Horseback riding is fully integrated in riding schools around the nation.

Golfers with no use of their legs now ride special carts that let them hit the ball from the tee and on the green. Special arms and hand attachments let arm amputees swing a club with the same precision and distance as a nondisabled golfer.

The list goes on and we all should celebrate these accomplishments because in ways big and small we all contribute to this progress every time we ride a bicycle, play a round of golf, hit the slopes, climb a (small) mountain, sail a boat, water ski or scuba. We all help to further the goal of making sports for those with disabilities as ubiquitous as it is with the general public in communities around the country. 
 
Sincerely,
 
 
Kirk Bauer, J.D.
Executive Director