How the Paralympics Have Expanded Into a Competitive Showcase of True Athletes

The postwar dream of a German doctor who escaped to England, the Paralympic Games off a chance for athletes like goalballer Tyler Merren to shine.

Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Ludwig Guttmann had planned carefully for July 29, 1948. That day, King George VI opened the London Olympics at Wembley Stadium, an occasion delayed for years by World War II. An hour to the northwest, Guttmann had organized a wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where the neurologist ran a center for spinal injuries. The former event involved dignitaries mingling with thousands of athletes from around the world. The latter had a few people gather behind the hospital to watch 16 archers who had been injured in the British Armed Forces. And if the events looked unrelated, there was an obvious parallel to Guttmann, who had been deliberate in his scheduling.

The doctor saw his archers as athletes every bit as worthy of respect as those at the Olympics. He only hoped that one day, the rest of the world might, too. “Small as it was,” Guttmann later wrote, “it was a demonstration to the public that competitive sport is not the prerogative of the able-bodied but that the severely disabled, even those with a disablement of such magnitude of spinal paraplegia, can become sportsmen and women in their own right.”

Guttmann lived a life far greater than sports. The German-born Jewish doctor trained under the most prominent neurosurgeon of his era, made a harrowing escape from the Nazis and ultimately landed with his family in England, where he revolutionized care for paraplegics. But it was that archery contest that came to headline his legacy: Guttmann’s tournament was the earliest version of what would become the Paralympic Games. His modest competition has grown into one of the biggest sporting events in the world. Still, it has kept its roots where Guttmann planted that first seed, and when the 2024 Paralympic Torch Relay began on Aug. 24, the flame was lit on the grounds of Stoke Mandeville. The space behind the hospital is now a large accessible sports complex. It is, in a sense, its own Olympia.

The modern Paralympics are nearly unrecognizable from Guttmann’s first archery tournament. The event has become more expansive in every sense—in the variety of sports, level of competition, range of disability represented and sheer size and scope of the event. But the ethos is the same. Just as Guttmann hoped, and as Paralympians have demonstrated over decades, the Games are a showcase of sportsmen and women in their own right.

“The severely disabled can become sportsmen and women in their own right,” Guttmann wrote. / Denver Post/Getty Images

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 After the Paralympic torch makes the journey from Stoke Mandeville to Paris, it will burn throughout 12 days of competition beginning Aug. 28, with more than 500 medal events in 22 sports. These range from sitting volleyball to wheelchair rugby to para cycling. They also include a game whose players call “the best sport you’ve never heard of.” Welcome to goalball.

The sport occupies a distinctive space at the Games. Most events in the Paralympic program have a direct Olympic equivalent. But there are two exceptions, sports that are not adaptations of existing games, but fresh inventions unto themselves, designed specifically for these athletes. One is boccia, a precision ball game, created for people with cerebral palsy. And the other is goalball, a fast-paced, hard court sport for the visually impaired.

The game’s origin story isn’t too far off from Guttmann’s archers at Stoke Mandeville. Goalball was created as a rehabilitation activity for blind World War II veterans in Europe in the late 1940s, and within a decade, it had developed into a competitive team sport. The modern game looks a little bit like handball and a lot like its own thing entirely. Think 3-on-3 soccer played on a volleyball court, only with players using their hands to bounce or spin the ball toward the opposing goal, and everyone on the floor diving to block shots with their bodies. The players track the action by listening. (The ball has tiny bells inside.) They wear black-out eyeshades to guarantee an equal playing field: They can qualify to play with varying degrees of visual impairment, but on the court, none of them should be able to see a thing. Which only makes the gameplay all the more frenetic.

“It’s not really like anything else,” says Tyler Merren, the longest tenured and most accomplished men’s goalball player for Team USA. “But it’s intense and people love it.”

Merren, 40, will be participating in his fifth Paralympics and seeking his third medal. An ambassador for the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes, he’s spent two decades with the national team, half a lifetime of travel and camaraderie and victories. But he considers his greatest gift from goalball to be his sense of self. Discovering the sport as a teenager “really changed who I became, ultimately,” Merren says.

The Paralympics have generated stars such as Trischa Zorn, who won 55 medals from 1980 to 2004. / ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images

He was born with limited vision that started to worsen as he grew older. His family initially had no answers for why that was happening or how it might progress. But at 13, Merren received a diagnosis of retinosis pigmentosa, which meant he had to begin readying himself for an almost total loss of vision. His hopes for standard teenage milestones suddenly disappeared. At an age when most kids are desperate to fit in, he found that he increasingly stood out, with nothing in his power to change the situation. Instead of counting down to getting his learner’s permit, Merren would be learning to read Braille, walk using a cane and navigate a very different version of the world. And he feared that losing his vision would mean losing sports. He’d grown up playing baseball and basketball as part of an athletic family in southwestern Michigan. It had never been easy, but for a time, he’d been able to compensate for his visual limitations with speed and strength. As his condition grew worse, that finally seemed to be over.  

“It was frustrating, because it wasn’t my athletics that was slowing me down,” Merren says. “I was always a pretty good athlete. It was my vision loss, and there was nothing I could do about that.”

When he was 15, however, Merren attended a sports education camp for visually impaired youths at Western Michigan University. The campers were introduced to adaptive versions of all kinds of sports: judo, swimming, climbing, wrestling, tandem cycling. Merren enjoyed them all. But what captured him most was a sport that was totally new to him. Goalball was fast, and it was challenging, and it offered a rare chance to feel like vision was irrelevant. There was no advantage here for sight: Everyone who stepped on the court put on those eyeshades first. Merren was hooked.

“My vision didn’t matter at that point,” he says. “It was just about the work that I wanted to put in and the athleticism that I had. And it just clicked right away.”

A new world opened to him from there. He spent the next few years competing in junior tournaments and soon made the senior national team before getting selected for his first Paralympics at age 20. (Team USA took home the bronze at the 2004 Games in Athens.) And he began returning to the Western Michigan camp as a volunteer. As a teenager, Merren had been struck by the adults he encountered there, most of whom had vision loss similar to his own and none of whom treated it like a tragedy. It was simply a fact. Their blindness had no bearing on their ability to build full, active lives, complete with jobs and families. So Merren comes back every year with his wife, Leanne, who is also blind, and he tries to give the campers the same perspective the older volunteers once gave him.

“It sounds kind of harsh,” Merren says. “But it’s really what I needed at the time … Their attitude was like, ‘Yeah, you’re going blind, big deal. Get over it. Let’s go play some ball.’ And it was awesome.”

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Guttmann's early Stoke Mandeville games included netball. / Raymond Kleboe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

That attitude isn’t so different from what Guttmann once espoused at Stoke Mandeville. When he began treating patients with spinal cord injuries, the medical perspective toward paraplegics was generally that any improvement was rare and there was no point in even attempting physical activity. The neurologist felt otherwise.  

“The defeatist attitude on the part of the medical profession was naturally shared by members of the para-medical professions—nurses and physiotherapists—and for the public as a whole, paraplegics were the subject of charity or a focus of curiosity,” Guttmann wrote in his Textbook of Sport for the Disabled.

He took the opposite view with his patients. “If the doctor feels hopeless, what can the patient feel?” he explained to reporters while on a tour of the United States in 1970.

Guttmann had begun to develop this perspective even before he finished his medical training in Germany. While still in school, he volunteered at an accident hospital for coal miners, and he spoke for the rest of his life about a patient he encountered there in 1917. The man had fractured his spine, and when Guttmann began taking notes, he was told not to waste his energy: “Don’t bother,” a doctor said. “He’ll be dead in a few weeks.” He was right. Confined to his bed, the patient developed pressure sores and suffered from infections, and he was soon dead of sepsis. Guttmann never forgot him. There had to be a better course of treatment, he decided.

That sparked an interest in neurology and neurosurgery, which led Guttmann to Breslau, which had one of the most pioneering departments in the specialty. He published research and became a university lecturer. But in 1933, just three years after his appointment, the Nazis barred Jewish doctors from practicing medicine in public hospitals. Guttmann was fired. Yet he refused to leave medicine. Instead, he moved to a local Jewish hospital, where he soon was elected medical director.

His role there came to an end in November 1938 with Kristallnacht, a wave of destruction carried out by the Nazi party against Jewish businesses and synagogues. Guttmann told his doctors to admit everyone who came to the hospital in need with no questions asked. The Gestapo became suspicious and demanded that Guttmann personally explain the medical rationale for every patient in the building. He did. Guttmann was able to justify the hospital stays of nearly all—saving dozens from being sent to concentration camps. “I did that standing with either my left or right foot in my own grave,” he recalled. “Every morning I had to report to the Gestapo.” He was married with two young children. Guttmann knew they had to find a way out.

He got his opportunity in the spring of 1939. The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics helped secure visas for Guttmann and his family, and they were able to escape to England, where a neurosurgeon sponsored him for research at Oxford. They could bring no money and few possessions. But they were overwhelmed by the kindness they found—even simple things, like an immigration guard trying to hurry their children in out of the cold, which became a lasting memory from their first day in the country.

“There was still compassion in the world,” Guttmann later said. “We had been so hardened by cruelty that we had forgotten.”

Archery was the first event Guttmann included. / Raymond Kleboe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Guttmann soon returned his focus to spinal cord injuries and finally had a chance to implement some of his beliefs. In 1941, he gave a presentation to the Medical Research Council of England on methods of treatment for paraplegics. He felt that with enough focus and encouragement, some patients might have the ability to recover a limited range of motion, and that nearly all patients could benefit from a different perspective. The council found his ideas persuasive—especially considering the increasing number of soldiers returning injured from the front lines—and soon asked Guttmann to launch a National Spinal Injuries Centre. The resources would be limited. But Guttmann would be able to experiment with philosophies of treatment as he saw fit.  

In 1944, the Centre opened at Stoke Mandeville, with most of the patients former servicemen. Guttmann’s ideas were considered radical. (“My colleagues thought I was crackers,” he later said.) But many of them were in fact incredibly simple. At Christmas that year, for instance, Guttmann had the paraplegics at the Centre form a choir to sing carols for patients in other wards of the hospital. “We can even give something to others,” a member of the choir said afterwards. “I never thought I’d ever be able to do that.” Guttmann encouraged the group to push themselves creatively and intellectually. And, of course, he encouraged them physically through sports.

Guttmann started by experimenting with a game he called wheelchair polo. “It was the consideration of the overall training effect of sport on the neuro-muscular system and because it seemed the most natural form of recreation to prevent boredom in hospital,” he wrote. Wheelchair polo was soon joined by darts, basketball, snooker, badminton and rope climbing. Guttmann began to dream of arranging more serious competition. As he watched London plan for the 1948 Summer Games, he knew he’d found an ideal moment to launch a grand event of his own, which led to his 16 archers lining up that July afternoon at Stoke Mandeville. Guttmann knew he wanted to hold a tournament again the next year. And he soon knew that he wanted to do something much bigger.

“At the prize-giving ceremony in 1949,” he later wrote, “I was somewhat carried away by the success of the Games that year, and, looking into the future, expressed the hope that the time might come when this event would be truly international and the Stoke Mandeville Games would achieve world fame as the disabled men and women’s equivalent of the Olympic Games.”

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Merren acknowledges that the Paralympic movement has made significant progress in recent years, but he still believes there is a long way to go for his fellow competitors to be viewed as simple athletes. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

 Guttmann’s competition saw its first international participants in 1952. It soon expanded to more athletes in more sports, and the Games were held outside Stoke Mandeville for the first time in 1960, in Rome immediately following the Olympics. Twenty-four years later, those Games were retroactively designated as the first Paralympic Games.

In the decades to come, the Games expanded to include not just athletes in wheelchairs, but also the visually impaired, amputees, those with cerebral palsy or traumatic brain injuries and more. Each Olympics shares a host city with the Paralympics, and the last decade has brought steadily increasing viewership, broadcast coverage and ticket sales. Guttmann’s idea of the Paralympics garnering “world fame as the disabled men and women’s equivalent of the Olympic Games” has come to fruition—and then some.

Still, challenges remain.

“I think sometimes people get the idea the Paralympics are a watered-down version of the Olympics,” Merren says. “And it’s really not right.”

The goalball veteran emphasizes that remarkable structural change has taken hold in the last few years. Merren has watched the U.S. Olympic Committee rename itself the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee—becoming the first country to do so—and commit to equal medal pay for Olympians and Paralympians. Yet he still finds himself encountering the same pernicious idea. There’s a tendency to view Paralympians competing not so much as athletes but as simple inspirational figures.

“They’re athletes, first and foremost, and they’re as competitive as any other athlete,” Merren says. “It’s totally appropriate and awesome to be inspired by the accomplishments that these athletes have. But I also encourage people to just watch the Games. Watch the Paralympics and watch the beauty of what these athletes do and think about it just through the lens of the athleticism they’re putting out there, despite the challenges they may have.”

Merren wants, in other words, just what Guttmann originally hoped: for people to see Paralympians as sportsmen and sportswomen in their own right.