Random Paralympic Athletes Generator

So the tool gave you a Paralympian

You wanted a Paralympic athlete and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand, tagged with sport and country. A pull might be a wheelchair racer, a blind swimmer, a sitting volleyball player, a boccia champion or a skier who races behind a guide.

The tool is the simple part. The Paralympics deserve a proper explanation, because most people watch them once every four years, understand roughly none of what they are seeing, and quietly assume it is the Olympics with an asterisk. It is not, and the way it actually works is genuinely fascinating.

It started in a hospital ward

In 1948, a neurosurgeon named Ludwig Guttmann, a German Jew who had fled to Britain, was treating soldiers with spinal cord injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. At that time such an injury was close to a death sentence, and the treatment was essentially to keep patients still and wait. Guttmann thought that was killing them, and prescribed sport instead: archery, wheelchair polo, darts, anything competitive.

On the day the London Olympics opened, he staged a small archery contest between sixteen injured veterans on the hospital lawn. That contest grew. By 1952 the Dutch had joined. By 1960 it had become a full international Games in Rome, four hundred athletes from twenty-three countries, and it has been held in the Olympic host city ever since. And the name is not what people think. Paralympic does not come from paraplegic. The "para" is Greek, meaning beside or alongside, because the Games run parallel to the Olympics. Every athlete on this list is a descendant of sixteen veterans shooting arrows on a lawn.

The letters and numbers nobody explains

Here is the thing that makes Paralympic sport comprehensible, and the thing broadcasters consistently fail to explain. When you see an event called the T44 long jump, or the 100 metres backstroke S12, those codes are the whole point.

Because impairments differ enormously in kind and degree, a system called classification sorts athletes into groups of similar functional ability, so that a race is a test of athletic quality rather than of who is least impaired. The letter tells you the sport and discipline, T for track, F for field, S for swimming. The number tells you the class, and lower numbers mean greater impairment. So a T12 sprinter has a visual impairment, a T44 has a lower-limb amputation, an S6 swimmer and an S12 swimmer are not remotely comparable. Team sports do it differently again: in wheelchair basketball each player is assigned a point value from 1 to 4.5 according to trunk control and mobility, and the five players on court cannot exceed fourteen points between them, which forces coaches to balance their teams. Classification is also, inevitably, the most contested part of the movement, because a class boundary can decide a career.

The most decorated athlete of either Games

Ask somebody to name the most successful Olympian and they will say Michael Phelps: twenty-eight medals, twenty-three golds. Now ask them to name the most successful athlete in the history of the Olympic or Paralympic Games, and almost nobody knows.

It is Trischa Zorn. An American swimmer, blind from birth, she competed at seven Paralympic Games between 1980 and 2004 and won fifty-five medals, forty-one of them gold. At her first Games she entered seven events and won seven golds. At Seoul in 1988 she won twelve. Forty-one gold medals is nearly double Phelps's total, and she is not a household name anywhere. This list is full of comparable figures: Sarah Storey, Britain's most decorated Paralympian, who won medals as a swimmer, got a persistent ear infection, switched to cycling and won a further dozen golds there; Esther Vergeer, who went unbeaten in wheelchair tennis singles for a decade; Tatyana McFadden, who has won all four major marathons in the same year, more than once. Draw any of them from the tool and you have pulled somebody whose record embarrasses most Olympic champions.

Faster than you think, and faster than the Olympics

Now, the part that reframes everything. At the Rio Games in 2016, the men's 1500 metres for visually impaired runners was won in a time faster than the winning time in the Olympic 1500 metres final held in the same city days earlier. Four runners in that Paralympic race finished quicker than the Olympic champion. They ran essentially blind.

The German long jumper Markus Rehm, who competes on a carbon-fibre blade after losing a leg in a wakeboarding accident, has jumped 8.48 metres, a distance that would have won gold at most Olympic Games in history, and the argument about whether he should be permitted to compete against non-disabled jumpers has never been settled. And a detail I love: in the visually impaired events, the guide who runs or skis alongside the athlete, tethered to them, is regarded as a competitor too and receives the same medal. Two people, one race, one gold each. Nothing in the Olympics works like that.

What a random Paralympian is good for

• Teaching and school projects. Draw a name, look up their classification, and you will learn more about how the Games work in ten minutes than a broadcast will tell you in a fortnight.
• Quiz and trivia prep. A random Paralympian is a brutally good question, because almost nobody can name five.
• Paralympic sweepstakes. Draw athletes for a group during the Games and follow them.
• Discovering a sport. Boccia, goalball and wheelchair rugby are extraordinary to watch and almost nobody has seen them. Draw a name and go and look.
• Settling a debate. Pull two athletes and argue the greater career, across sports and across classifications.

Paralympic questions

What do the numbers like T44 and S12 mean?

They are classifications. The letter indicates the sport or discipline and the number indicates the class, with lower numbers meaning greater impairment. The system groups athletes of similar functional ability so that the competition tests athletic quality rather than degree of impairment.

Who is the most decorated Paralympian?

Trischa Zorn of the United States, a swimmer blind from birth, who won fifty-five medals including forty-one golds across seven Games. That is substantially more gold than any Olympian, including Michael Phelps.

Does Paralympic mean paraplegic?

No. The "para" is Greek for beside or alongside, reflecting that the Games run parallel to the Olympics. The movement began with the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948 and became the Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960.

Can I pull several athletes, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for filtering by sport or country.

References

1. International Paralympic Committee. paralympic.org
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Paralympic Games. britannica.com