The organisers of the 2012 Paralympics are worried about 300 athletes – 7% of all competitors – who are “bending the rules” in order to compete in classes where they are more likely to win gold medals.
Peter van der Vliet, the International Paralympic Committee’s chief medical officer, who oversees the complex medical and functional classification which every athlete must go through to compete, confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that seven per cent of the entrants had been called for checks.
Every sport has its unique classification structure across the disability sport groups involved, whether for visual impairment, wheelchair, amputee, cerebral palsy or intellectual disability. Some athletes are trying to make it easier for themselves by competing in the incorrect classes where they will have an unfair advantage over the other competitors
At the Beijing Games, 700 out of 4 000 athletes were tested to ensure they were in the correct classification grouping. 90 per cent were reassigned. This is far too many to assume they were simple mistakes. Essentially nearly all of those that were re-checked at the last games were trying to cheat.
The process of checking the paralympians is very similar to that of anti-doping checks at the Olympics. Trained classifiers will be present throughout the Paralympics to make sure that the competitors are in the correct classes.
As mundane as you may think this sounds, imagine the outcry if it was found that 7% of those competing at the Olympics where cheating in some way or another. Van der Vliet said: “In some able-bodied sports, athletes can be grouped, for example, by age, gender and weight. Classification is no different than those components. Classification is a concept, but a scientific one that works. It is all done in the interests of fairness.”
Another aspect that authorities have to deal with is the fact that disabled athletes also like to inflict pain on themselves, to enhance performance, via a technique called “boosting”.
The BBC have compiled a good list of how the various sports are classified.
[Source: The Telegraph]
