By Pietro Barbieri

Sport for people with disabilities emerged from rehabilitation efforts in the post-war period. It was a way to make physiotherapy more interesting and enjoyable. Play and fun helped people rediscover the joys of life, in their new condition, where a traumatic event was involved, or in their body from birth.

There were two specific purposes: to strengthen people’s physical autonomy, and to help them recover a genuine and solid identity of their own. One might say today that there was a shift from rehabilitation-focused play to empowerment. In other words, empowering those who felt they did not have any power or had lost it. Power over themselves and their own decisions. The core of human rights.

The natural way to do this is through people’s social image – the image perceived by others. The path of self-recovery immediately crosses over into the community in which people live. Taking part in sport becomes a means of claiming one’s own fundamental rights and dignity.

This has been a long journey in the dark; the pioneers of the 1960s were heroes before their time. Nevertheless, they were heroes in the long journey between those years and contemporary times. It was a struggle to achieve recognition of the athletic ability of Paralympians.

One event will go down in history: the 1988 Seoul Olympics. It was the culminating point in the battle to achieve recognition in the sporting world, where stigma surrounding physical, sensory and mental ideals was so strong that it constituted a greater obstacle than even inclusion in the world of work, where an unproductivity prejudice prevailed instead. Those Olympics were historic because the International Olympic Committee wanted to introduce competitions for athletes with disabilities alternating with those without disabilities. It was an experiment that took place only once, because organisational issues – in particular those linked to accessibility – made it difficult to continue down that path. Although debatable, that choice gave rise to the Paralympics that we know today, which gives proper recognition to the athletic efforts of each Paralympian. We finally entered a world of sport practised by all, for all. A new era.

From there, Paralympic sport needed to be made appealing to the vast number of people who followed sport either in person or on television. In 1988 in Seoul, the television commentators were so out of touch that they didn’t even know who the favourites were in each individual competition. As can be imagined, the results were disastrous. With time, sports journalists have learned to follow the activities of athletes with disabilities. This was a fundamental step towards changing the narrative.

This brings us to another fundamental event: the 2012 London Olympics. Impeccably organised, with a strong television campaign in the UK in particular. This resulted in full stadiums in every field of sport. It was also the moment when certain athletes – thanks to the new journalistic narrative – became famous. Just like their Olympic colleagues.

The world has changed since the 1950s. The feeling of no longer being completely invisible has become a collective asset of the world of disability. Here, this narrative is a path we hope can be replicated in all areas of people’s lives, just as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states: ‘a paradigm shift ... is needed’. In sport, despite everything, there certainly has been one.