stevev@chemstor.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender) (02/25/90)
Index Number: 6948 In article <10287@bunker.UUCP> C04810JA@WUVMD.BITNET (joel achtenberg) writes: >Index Number: 6859 >I'm a great fan of Special Olympics, tho I agree the name itself >may not be the best. The program provides an important training, >recreation and socialization function for some individuals who >might not otherwise be able to participate in competitive sports. >Of course, I would prefer to have athletes participate in >"mainstream" recreation and/or competition whenever possible, and >would love to see adaptive sports (eg. wheelchair basketball, etc) >included in mainstream events. And whenever an athlete is >inappropriately sidelined to Special Olympics it is misuse of the >Special Olympics program, and the athlete him/herself. About the only problem I have with the name "Special Olympics" is that officially it is applied to competitions for the developmentally disabled, but colloquially it is used as a generic term for adaptive athletic events. I don't know how many times I've been asked whether I participate in the Special Olympics, and I tell the questioner that I'm not qualified because my disability is physical and not developmental. I think that most adaptive athletic events follow the principle of competition among comparative abilities--just as minor league baseball teams don't play major league baseball teams, it would be unfair and discouraging for someone with moderate or severe CP to run against people without CP. There is an involved classification system that divides disabled athletes into major groups such as blind, amputee, CP, and wheelchair (spinal cord injury), then subdivides each major class into three to eight subclasses based on amount of disability. Then WC IVs are supposed to compete against other WC IVs. While in theory this should make for fair competition, in practice classification criteria are often not related to actual athletic performance, meaning that one CP 8 might be very much better than another CP 8 in the same event. Another problem of the current classification systems is that they are too finely divided in many cases, meaning that even a fairly large meet will often have only one or two people competing in the same class. I have become less and less involved in events specifically and exclusively for the disabled in the past couple of years because of the problems of classification and the lack of interesting competition. I have also switched my competitive emphasis from swimming to distance wheelchair racing. Wheelchair racing offers more competitions, an egalitarian attitude (usually there is no classification or only very general categories such as men, women, quad, and junior), and integration into conventional road races. (I also can't get peak speeds of 30 miles per hour in a swimming race.) Swimming competitions for the disabled, on the other hand, usually have few easily available competitions, involve narrow classification of participants, and are not usually associated with events for the non-disabled. Although my personal preference is to participate in more mainstream events, my experience with competitions intended specifically for the disabled has shown me that they can be fair, enjoyable, and encouraging, and are not just attempts to shunt disabled athletes out of the mainstream or patronize them. In fairness I should point out that wheelchair racers in a running race are competing against each other and not the runners; I think it is unfair to compare wheelchair racers and runners since a wheelchair racer is much faster than a runner of similar ability and training. In that sense a wheelchair road race is specifically for disabled athletes, but is usually either associated with a running race or treated much like a mainstream event. An interesting side note is that there has been controversy about the participation of non-disabled athletes in wheelchair racing. Usually the arguments against assert that the non-disabled have no business participating in a sport that is supposedly intended for the disabled. My opinion is that a wheelchair racer who does not use a wheelchair in everday life is at a significant disadvantage and will lack the skill and strength of a wheelchair user, so I don't think there would be any chance of the sport coming to be dominated by non-disabled athletes and there's nothing to worry about. -- Steve VanDevender stevev@chemstor.uoregon.edu "Bipedalism--an unrecognized disease affecting over 99% of the population. Symptoms include lack of traffic sense, slow rate of travel, and the classic, easily recognized behavior known as walking."