It started with basketball - International Paralympic Committee celebrates 25th Anniversary

BONN - Founded in 1989 to succeed the International Co-ordination Committee of World Sports Organisations for the Disabled (ICC), the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) celebrated its 25th Anniversary on September 22.

While the Paralympic Games began in 1960 in Rome, the ICC was not established until 1982 at the insistence of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who understood that the growing Paralympic Movement needed a dedicated governing body to organise the games.

Wheelchair basketball was one of the original Paralympic sports contested in Rome and was first played at the predecessor to the Paralympics, the International Stoke Mandeville Games (ISMG) which were initiated in 1948 by Dr Ludwig Guttmann at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Ayelsbury, Buckinghamshire, Great Britain. 

But that wasn't until the late 1950s.

According to historian Tip Thiboutot, in the mid-1940s, while American rehabilitation hospitals in Framingham, Massachusetts and Birmingham, California, were seeing the benefits of developing the game for rehabilitative purposes for soldiers wounded during World War II, Guttman was doing the same with the British relative of the game called netball.

While also played with a ball and a net suspended on a pole, netball did not use a backboard and the game at that time did not include any form of dribbling.

This is documented by the reports of American teams that travelled to Aylesbury for the Stoke Mandeville Games in the early 1950s. It is also corroborated by no less than the current president of the IPC, Sir Philip Craven, a former Paralympic wheelchair basketball competitor for Great Britain and past president of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation (IWBF).

In his book 'Wheelchairs Can Jump', co-written with Stan Labanowich, Thiboutot notes that Craven wrote in an IWBF newsletter in 2000 that, "[w]heelchair basketball did not exist in Europe in the late 1940s."

While the origins have been argued, unassailable is the fact that wheelchair basketball for men has been a central part of every summer Paralympic Games, with women participating since 1968, and will be going forward.

At a special Gala Dinner celebrating the IPC's silver anniversary in Berlin last Saturday, Craven, now in his third and final term as president, said: "Building upon the foundations laid by our forefathers, we have created something that has changed the lives of millions and touched the hearts and minds of billions more."

Guests at the event included Princess Margriet of the Netherlands; Dr Thomas de Maiziere, the German Minister of the Interior; and Bernd Kroemer, Berlin State Secretary.

Congratulatory messages came from many world leaders including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, United States of America President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Korean President Park Geun-hye.

The United Nations Secretary General went with sports metaphors in his message.

"The United Nations congratulates the IPC on its 25th anniversary. You win at promoting sport to unite people. You score big at celebrating diversity. And you are gold medal champion of human rights. I warmly applaud the officials, athletes and others driving the Paralympic Movement," he said.

Craven also read out a letter from another basketball player, President Obama, part of which read: "The Paralympic Games - which are now among the largest sporting events in the world - serve as a powerful reminder of the inherent dignity of every individual and of what is possible with determination and grit."

FIBA