Decoding the "Para" in Paralympic

 Before ever knowing about the Paralympics, and I am talking about even knowing what it pertain too, I thought it was something far more different than what it actually was. As goofy as this will sound and even may make me look, I thought that Paralympics was some form of sub-genre for a sport in the Olympics that had to do with parachuting and other sports pertaining to this category. But obviously I found out that I was far far wrong. Now, before reading through the articles and chapter, I am going to speak about what I knew prior to these readings. Before the readings, I knew that the Paralympics were essentially a side-by-side sort of deal with the Olympics that was for individuals with some form of disability that still wanted to compete in sporting competitions. That was essentially all I knew, I wasn't sure as to what kind of sports they took part in or how it was organized. Which in hindsight, a little bit I guess I would say selfish of me to not further my knowledge on this area mainly because I love to learn about all sorts of things that I haven't heard of before. But regardless of this, from our chapter and article readings it has helped open my eyes and has allowed me to grasp a further understanding of the subject at hand. 


Now for starters, I would like to say that all articles and the chapter helped further my knowledge on the topic at hand, but there was one that stuck out more than all of them combined. The article entitled "Brief History Of The Paralympic Games: From post-WWII Rehabilitation To Mega Sport Event" really touched on what I would say are very important key factors about the topic of Paralympic. From WWII, mainly soldiers and even civilians suffered from lifelong disabilities due to the effects of the war. In 1944, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann who was very well known due to his innovative practices in not just medical rehabilitation but also in motivating those with spinal injuries. He would introduce sport into the rehabilitation regime, which quickly would gain traction and become a sport competition. Skip ahead a few years, mainly focusing on 1960 to 1984, there were only two Paralympic Games that were hosted in the same city as the Olympic Games but there were no formal ties between the two. Skip to 1988, the Paralympics and Olympics were hosted in Seoul, Korea where the host organizers "for the first time ensured that the Paralympic athletes competed in the same venues (except housed in different villages) as the Olympic Games" (Darcy & Legg, 2016). Finally in the following year, that being 1989, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) was officially formed. Skip ahead to now, the Paralympics has been a huge success. It has a massive television presence where during the London 2012 Paralympics, it massed a total 3.8 billion views. On top of this, it has also been mentioned around 1.3 million tweets during the 2012 London Paralympics. With the Paralympics being able to now compete as a side-by-side program to the Olympics, it has allowed individuals with disadvantages to be viewed differently in their countries thanks to this. 

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