Wheelchair Sports

Wheelchair Sports

Wheelchairs are the best way to move for these people who, because of natural or accidental causes, cannot use their legs. Although this can seem a very comfortable way to travel, one person in wheelchair face a lot of problems. First at all, not too many cities are adapted to these disabilities, some buildings don’t have ramps to enter, an elevator to go to the upper floors or adapted bathrooms. But also there is a problem if you want to move through the city because the public transport not necessary have a way to allow you to enter with a wheelchair –you only need to see the trams in Arad.

But in this article, we won’t speak about the problems in the public transport –you can read other posts in this blog related with this topic. We’ll deal with something related with leisure: Wheelchair sports and its specific chairs.

Fencing is a popular sport where two players can fight trying to touch the opponent
with a sword. Picture from Wikipedia

Wheelchair Sports

Due to the quantity of sports, we’ll only allude to the most popular. Each sport needs a chair especially adapted to the game. Because they need to withstand fast movements or violent impacts, these chairs are more stable and lighter than a daily one, but have the problem that it’s impossible to fold them, so you need a lot of space to have one of them.

During the last decades, wheelchair sports increased their popularity appearing in tournaments and the Paralympic Games (last one celebrated in Rio de Janeiro). Due to that, we can find a lot of diversity strengthening some of the chairs while others are more focused in velocity and freedom of movement. Here we have some of these sports and its wheelchair:

Tennis wheelchair. Picture from
http://www.paralympics.com

              -Tennis wheelchair – Wheelchair tennis are designed to move in a fast way from one side of the tennis court to the other. For that, the wheels are extended so that the player can arrive to the ball and they allow turning fast to left and right. Brad Parks, who started to be in a wheelchair due to an accident in a mountain, decided to help others adapting the tennis when he neede rehabilitation (from 1977). That moment suppose the beginning of the sport. But it was not until 1988 when the International Wheelchair Tennis Foundation (IWFT) was founded and, with the help of Brad Parks, the news of wheelchair tennis grew gaining popularity.

Wheelchair to practice basketball. Picture from:
http://www.miamiheatwheels.com

               -Basketball wheelchair- Although they look very similar to the Tennis/Padel wheelchair, we can find some slight differences. One of these is the iron bar located on the front of the chair. Basketball, as rugby, is a chair-to-chair contact sport. That means that it’s very easy to collide with other player and this bar protect from this collisions. The beginning of this sport is found during the forties when Ludwig Guttman started to adapt some sports to people with disabilities who were at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, England. The IWBF (International Wheelchair Basketball Federation) regulate this sport with 82 national organizations spread all around the world.

As you can see, every sport needs especial equipment. This is not something easy to achieve because the material can be very expensive –basely, the wheelchair, it need to fix your body- but it’s necessary to play and have a healthy life. And we cannot forget that there are plenty of wheelchair sports that are not as visible as others but still like that we can support like, for example, fencing or Boccia. Try to discover more about these sports and its people!