Being Disabled, Becoming a Champion

Being Disabled, Becoming a Champion is an accessible presentation of current European research on the most recent evolutions in sports for people with disabilities, demonstrating knowledge developed from the field of sports practices of people with disabilities. It covers three interrelated themes. First, it covers the different facets of the history of sports organizations set up during the 1950s for athletes with motor or intellectual impairments. The second part focuses on the athletes themselves. Voices are given to the top-level athletes in adapted sports: people with intellectual impairment; the pioneers of wheelchair racing who invented a new discipline, off-road wheelchair racing; and a former Paralympic athlete who has become a researcher and a defender of specific sports practices. Finally, the third part interrogates the way support for disabled people can modify the existing definitions and conceptions of the body, of disability, of what is human, and of sports performance. This is an ideal text for students and researchers studying and working in the areas of Disability Studies, Sport Sciences and Paralympic Studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Nicolas Bancel is a Professor in Sport History and Postcolonial Studies at the Sport Sciences Institute of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Julie Cornaton holds a PhD in Sport Sciences from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Anne Marcellini is a Professor in Sport Sociology and Disability Studies at the Sport Sciences Institute of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

1. Introduction: From the making of Paralympic champions to justification of the bio-technical improvement of man. The ideology of progress in action History of sport organizations and their actors 2. The divisive origins of sports for physically disabled people in Switzerland (1956-1968) 3. The development of Swiss wheelchair athletics. The key role of the Swiss Association of Paraplegics (1982-2015) 4. The manager, the doctor and the technician: political recognition and institutionalization of sport for the physically disabled in France (1968-1973) 5. Sports games for people with intellectual disabilities. Institutional analysis of an unusual international configuration Athletes lyrics: competitor, pioneer, researcher 6. The "fresh talk" of adapted sport athletes 7. The institutionalization of off-road wheelchair riding in France (1990-2015): 'truly a sport of sharing and diversity' 8. Athlete, anthropologist and advocate: moving towards a lifeworld where difference is celebrated Various bodies, modified bodies, modular bodies 9. Technology at the service of natural performance: cross analysis of the Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya cases 10. Prosthetic dreams: "Wow Effect", mechanical paradigm and modular body - prospects 2. on prosthetics 11. Ethics and enhancement in sport: becoming the fastest (human?) being