by Cathy Wood
With that in mind, Philip would spend hours learning how to master skills such as dribbling, passing, shooting and wheelchair control. Add to that determination, a willingness to learn and hours on court – week in, week out – and that’s how he honed himself into a great player. ‘I loved the sport and wanted to get as good as I could be,’ he says. ‘I trained three hours a day – I knew I was a good player.’ Then, with court practice over, he would get staff at the McDougall Centre in Manchester to carry him up the stairs to finish his training with another hour in the pool. It was clear that he was putting in the effort needed to become a great sportsman.
Craven graduated from Manchester in 1972, the same year he made his first of five appearances for Britain at the Paralympic Games. The Games were held in Heidelberg, rather than Munich, where the Summer Olympic Games took place. In Heidelberg he competed in two sports, Swimming and Wheelchair Basketball.
By now truly world-class, Craven was approached at Heidelberg and asked if he would like to play for the French Wheelchair Basketball team, Club Olympique de Kerpape in Brittany. In November 1972, he accepted. Today we think nothing of sportsmen and women going abroad to further careers and salaries: Jonny Wilkinson plays for French rugby club Toulon, while 2009 World backstroke swimming champion Gemma Spofforth lives and trains in Florida and World Triathlon winner Tim Don spends much of his time preparing in Stellenbosch, South Africa. In Paralympic sport in 1972, it was almost certainly unheard of, though.
Kerpape had a rehabilitation centre where, for £90 a month, Craven would devise outdoor training circuits to help patients become competent in their chairs during the day. At night he would train with the Club. Apart from the experience, the move brought other unexpected, life-changing benefits, as it was here that he met his future wife Jocelyne, who was working as a physiotherapist at the same rehabilitation centre.
With plenty of international experience under his belt and two successful seasons in France completed, Craven returned to England in August 1974, having married Jocelyne in a fishing chapel in Brittany, just down the coast from the rehabilitation centre, and settled into a new job as a graduate management trainee with the National Coal Board, who were more than amenable in providing him with time off to compete. ‘He was certainly one of the best players in the world,’ says Gerry Kinsella. ‘There were two or three others who would have been his equal, but none would have been better.’ Great Britain, meanwhile, were already developing into a formidable international wheelchair basketball team. In 1971 and 1974, they were European Champions, while in 1973, they became inaugural winners of the Gold Cup, or World Championships.
In the summer of 1976, attention was turning towards the build-up to the Paralympic Games to be held in Toronto, Canada (rather than the Olympic city of Montreal). As a member of the successful World and European winning British team, Craven was looking forward to selection for Toronto, which was due to be announced at the end of the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1976, which both Philip and Jocelyne were attending. For him, selection seemed a formality.
At this point it must be remembered that Ludwig Guttmann and Philip Craven were both formidable, pioneering characters with passionate views, albeit from two different generations. So when one person such as Guttman, who started the Games, came up against someone like Craven, who was starting to formulate a view that the set-up needed to start changing, differences were inevitable.
This began one night while Philip and Jocelyne sat watching swimming events and the Team Manager came over to chat to them. Philip spoke frankly about his views, little knowing thus would have far-reaching consequences. The next morning he was summoned to appear before Guttmann, other Stoke Mandeville officials, the Team Manager and some of the coaches to explain his outburst. He repeated his belief that some coaches were incompetent and not up to the job. Guttmann, who was not used to having his authority challenged, was not amused. Craven recalls, ‘He told me if I stepped out of line again between then and when the plane took off for Toronto, I would not be in the team whether I was one of the best players in the world or not. That was the end of it; there was no discussion.’
As it turned out, the British Wheelchair Basketball team, who were reigning European Champions, under-performed in Canada and returned home disappointed.
With the Games over, Philip was looking forward to his next involvement with the British team, which would be the European Championships, but months went by and he heard nothing. In those days teams did not train year round, as they do today, but even so he knew training days were due to be scheduled into everyone’s diary. But still he heard nothing.
Finally, he approached the chairman of his club, Southport, and asked him to write to Guttmann to find out what was going on. According to Craven, Guttmann replied saying Philip Craven and Gerry Kinsella might be among the finest exponents of the game in the world, but since they were incapable of team play, they were banned for life – unless they apologised.
Kinsella never did play for Britain again and although wheelchair basketball was as important to him as it was to Philip, he was adamant he could not apologise: ‘I am a stickler for principles. No one told me why I was banned. I refused to apologise.’
In the end the Craven’s ban was of no consequence. According to him the performance of the British team declined, and both he and Kinsella were invited back into the fold. ‘They realised they could not do without the two of us,’ he says. ‘I thought I would achieve more change from being within than being outside.’ He could see that by getting involved as an administrator he could have huge influence and went on to be instrumental in changing the way wheelchair basketball athletes were classified so they were no longer dictated to by doctors but classified on a broader, more sport-specific basis.
By the late 1970s other athletes were starting to realise that they were only ever the recipients of services and not participants. Change was close at hand. According to Tony Sainsbury, who was Chef de Mission (or Team Manager) of the Great Britain Paralympic Team for five Games, from 1980 until 1996, athletes were already reacting to imposed rules. ‘The athletes were always spoken to as patients,’ he recalls. Then one night, after the 1979 Stoke Mandeville Games, according to Sainsbury, they decided it was time to party.
Plentiful supplies of alcohol were purchased and music set up in one of the tents used for Wheelchair Fencing during the Games. The beverages were ready and the music prepared when they realised they had nothing with which to illuminate proceedings so one car and one Toyota campervan were driven inside the open flat of the tent and left, engines running and lights glaring, to ensure the party went ahead. According to Sainsbury, when those who managed the Stoke Mandeville Games found out, technical officers were ordered to immediately shut down the party. The athletes protested and a disagreement ensued.
Parties or not, the Games, athletes and innovators were changing, and it wasn’t just among athletes such as Craven and Kinsella that changes were afoot. There were also changes in the way the Paralympic Games were run and who could compete in them. From 1960 until 1972, the only athletes permitted to take part in the Paralympic Games had spinal cord injuries. A spinal cord injury can affect specific areas of the body; injuries sustained to the middle and lower areas of the spinal cord can cause paraplegia, where the lower limbs and all or part of the trunk are impaired. If the spinal cord is damaged further up the spine, in the neck, quadriplegia or tetraplegia may occur, where both upper and lower limbs are impaired. The way the athlete is classified refers to the area in the spine which is damaged. Conditions such as spina bifida and polio, where muscle function is impaired, also fall within this category.
In 1976, two more disability groups were added: athletes with a visual impairment, or blind athletes, and amputees. Athletes with a visual impairment covers all conditions which affect vision. There are different categories within this group, from those with a reduced visual field to total blindness. Amputees must be missing at least one joint or part of an extremi
ty, such as an elbow, wrist, ankle or knee. Such losses can be congenital, from birth, or as a result of illness or accident. The classification of an amputee athlete depends on a number of factors, including whether it is an upper or lower limb impairment, whether a single limb is involved or multiple limbs and the location of the amputation – for example, above or below the knee. In 1976, these three disability groups made up the Paralympic Games.
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As the 1970s progressed, Guttmann became increasingly elderly. He had, by now, received countless awards in recognition of his exceptional influence and work, including a Knighthood. In July 1979, a glittering 80th birthday party was held for him, where Prince Charles and several other celebrities were the guests of honour. It would be the last time they would all come together for him: in October of the same year he suffered a heart attack and died on 18 March 1980.
Even before his death the Paralympic Games were becoming less about rehabilitating patients after accidents and far more about individual performances in a variety of sports, a transformation reinforced by a number of polls carried out for the 1980 Games, which were held in Arnhem, Holland, rather than the Olympic city of Moscow. According to results published in a special commemorative book for the 1980 Games, a survey of 18 countries revealed little or no truth in the belief doctors were the driving force behind sport for athletes with a disability. According to the survey only eight per cent of athletes were urged by a doctor to take up sport, whereas 54 per cent were encouraged by relatives or friends.
Also in 1980, athletes with Cerebral Palsy (CP) were admitted to the Games. Cerebral Palsy is caused by of a lack of oxygen to the brain, which leads to damage affecting muscle tone, reflexes and posture or movement. The condition can occur before, or at birth, or following a stroke or head injury. Sufferers are classified differently depending on their level of impairment and which muscle groups are affected. The inclusion of CP athletes took the number of disability groups to four – spinal cord, athletes with a visual impairment, amputees and CP. And so the Games kept growing.
The 1984 Paralympic Games were supposed to be split between two American cities: Champaign, Illinois would host the wheelchair events and New York would host all the others. However, the Illinois part of the organisation suffered from funding problems and Stoke Mandeville stepped in at the last minute to take over. Although it was a huge task to take over from Illinois and agree to host the wheelchair events of the Games at Stoke Mandeville with only a few months notice, rather than the four years their predecessors had, as well as raise the funds required and organise accommodation for the athletes, everyone involved was determined that the Games should go on. And against the odds, they did. They were even opened, at very short notice, by Prince Charles.
This Games saw a fifth disability group added – ‘Les Autres’. French for ‘the others’, Les Autres covers all athletes who do not fit into the other disability groups and include conditions such as arthrogryposis, multiple sclerosis and dwarfism. To top it all, the 1984 Games were the first where the IOC officially approved the use of the name Paralympic Games.
So the Games were expanding gradually but one edition changed the Paralympic experience forever – Seoul 1988.Without a doubt these more than any other Games that had gone before were a watershed moment in Paralympic history. Whether out of a sense of duty to the athletes or to their country, the Seoul Organising Committee embraced the challenge of hosting and welcoming Paralympic athletes.
‘I will never, ever forget it,’ says Tony Sainsbury, the British Chef de Mission in Korea. ‘I remember being in the tunnel for the Opening Ceremony and walking out in front as the leader of our team into bright sunshine and seeing 80,000 screaming fans. I never imagined there would be more than 5,000 people watching, or to see such a magnificent stadium absolutely packed.’ And he wasn’t the only one who was overcome. ‘As I looked around a lot of my team were crying,’ he says. ‘For the first time in history they had been recognised and identified in a sporting situation.’
But it wasn’t just the athletes who were affected: up in the stands those who had followed the Paralympic Movement from the outset were struggling with their own emotions. ‘The Olympic Stadium was full,’ recalls Jean Stone. ‘I had a tear in my eye seeing the teams come out and hearing the noise – I had been to some Games when it had been silent.’
As the Games unfolded, the Koreans delivered sell-out crowds at the various venues, day after day. How they achieved this – by enlisting church communities and schoolchildren and assigning different countries for each group to support – was less important than the impact on all who experienced it. ‘I don’t think the Koreans knew who they were cheering for, but they cheered. The place was heaving and it was what they, the athletes, had always hoped for,’ Sainsbury recalls.
The Seoul Games were significant for another reason, as never again would the Paralympic Games be held in a different city to the Olympic Games. Twenty-eight years after the first Games for athletes with a disability were held outside the UK in Rome in 1960, and nearly 30 years after ‘that’ Guttmann speech, his desire for disabled athletes to be alongside, or parallel, to the Olympic Games had finally been achieved.
Between 1988 and 1992 standards went up again in terms of organisation and athlete performance. The professionalism seen in Barcelona in 1992 had raised the organisational side of the Games to a new benchmark level, so Atlanta 1996 had a tough act to follow. But the Games took a temporary dip in terms of the quality of the facilities athletes had now come to expect and this inevitably impacted on the competitors. This illustrates how fastidious the organisers have to be to keep on top of the number of potential problems associated with the presence of so many people in one place: getting things wrong inevitably attracts criticism.
For Tanni Grey-Thompson, who retired in 2007 after a glittering career spanning five Games (1988–2004) and 11 Paralympic gold medals, Atlanta 1996 was the third of the five Games she had attended as an athlete. She was not impressed with the set-up. ‘I was sharing a room with another wheelchair user and it was tiny. We had to move the wardrobe out into the communal area and place kit on the bottom of the bed – there was no room for two wheelchairs,’ she says. ‘They used part of the Olympic Village but once the Olympics were over, they started to take it down.’
According to Jean Stone, now at her 10th Games, Atlanta 1996 felt underwhelming. ‘It was a blip,’ she says. There was little link between the Organising Committees of the two Games, which had consequences for the smooth-running of the event. ‘The accommodation was the same, but there was no handover,’ she continues. ‘All the keys for the rooms were in a big biscuit box and they had to spend hours sorting through the keys to find which ones fitted which rooms.
‘When the officials arrived there were beds, but no linen or pillows,’ she recalls. ‘The catering facilities were placed at the top of a hill (which made wheelchair access hard). The drivers were volunteers and struggled with the ever-changing traffic system.’ Spectator numbers were also lower than in previous Games, which made it difficult to generate atmosphere in the venues. ‘In Barcelona, people had queued to get in. I could not believe it,’ Stone says. ‘In Atlanta, I don’t think the stadium was even full for the Opening Ceremony.’
Although Atlanta 1996 attracted less credit than Barcelona, at least the Paralympic Games ensured the continuity of the movement and the principle of holding the Games in the same city as the Olympic Games. The Atlanta Games also saw the sixth and, so far, final disability group admitted for the first time: Athletes with an Intellectual Disability (ID). Intellectual Disability refers to athletes with a cognitive impairment that affects an individual’s ability to deal with life’s everyday challenges. However, the inclusion of ID athletes turned out to be short-lived.
Whether the young Spanish journalist Carlos Ribagorda had any idea of the impact his actions or story would eventually have, when in the months before the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games he joined and trained with
the Spanish Basketball team with Intellectual Disabilities, even though he himself had no disability, seems unlikely but the scandal he subsequently wrote about had repercussions for all athletes with an intellectual disability that today has been rectified.
Ribagorda went to Sydney and helped the Spanish Basketball team reach the final, where they crushed the Russians by 87 points to 63 to take gold. Spain rejoiced – but not for long. In the weeks that followed Ribagorda broke the story that 10 of the 12 team members, including himself, were, in fact, not mentally impaired and did not meet the necessary qualification criteria to be there, which included having an IQ of less than 75. Ribagorda also claimed the practice of selecting athletes with no actual disability took place in other Spanish Paralympic sports, including Athletics, Table Tennis and Swimming.
Although the allegations were initially denied, an investigation corroborated Ribagorda’s findings. Two key Spanish officials were expelled from the IPC, who made it clear this type of deceit would not be tolerated. The Spanish Basketball team gave back their gold medals but the damage, for ID athletes, was done.
It was clear that new processes needed to be implemented to verify an athlete’s disability within the sport they wished to compete in and until those processes could be tried and tested, the decisive step was made in 2001 to remove the ID category from the Paralympic programme. The six disability groups were five once more.
But by November 2009, it was clear that the new measures for assessing ID athletes were now robust enough for the IPC to announce that ID competitors would be returning to the Paralympic Games in London 2012 in three sports – Athletics, Swimming and Table Tennis – ending their 12-year absence. And so, competitors from six disability groups are expected to participate in the 20 existing sports making up the Paralympic programme. There are no debut sports for 2012, but Rio 2016 can look forward to two new ones – Para Canoe and Para-Triathlon, taking the total to 22. How the Games have moved on.