Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Paralympic Movement
The Paralympic Games have increasingly evolved since the Stoke Mandeville Games of 29 July 1948 and become one of the world’s biggest sporting events. This week organisations like WheelPower and the International Paralympic Committee are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first Games, which later became the Paralympic Games. The landmark occasion also coincides with the 70th year since the founding of the National Spinal Injuries Centre (NSIC).
During the Second World War, the British Government asked German doctor Ludwig Guttmann to open a spinal injuries centre at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Great Britain.
As a consequence of that petition, rehabilitation sport would evolve to recreational sport and then to competitive sport. The perception of people with impairments would dramatically change throughout the world and one of the biggest sporting events would come into being.
Guttmann, ‘Poppa’ to his family and friends, was a formidable and strong man who never doubted in putting himself in danger if that meant helping someone else.
His daughter Eva Loeffler shared an anecdote that perfectly describes his father’s personality when being Medical Director of the Jewish Hospital in Breslau, Germany.
During the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, when Jewish houses and businesses were attacked by the Nazis, 60 Jewish people escaped to Breslau Hospital. Guttmann allowed all of them in, admitting them as patients.
Loeffler said:
“The next day the Gestapo [Nazi secret police] came round to see my father, wanting to know why such a large number of admissions had happened overnight. My father was adamant that all the men were sick and said many of them were suffering from stress. He took the Gestapo from bed to bed, justifying each man’s medical condition.”
As the situation under Hitler in Germany worsened, Guttmann and his family fled to England in 1939.
Loeffler recalled the difficulties:
“He [Guttman] was a refugee from Nazi Germany escaping with his immediate family just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He had to begin living and working in England at the age of 40 with a poor grasp of the language and unable to continue his career as a neurologist and neurosurgeon.”
But Guttmann overcame all obstacles and began working on his master piece. The first edition of the Stoke Mandeville Games was held on 29 July 1948, with 16 injured servicemen and women competing in archery.
Three decades later, Guttmann would fly back to his home country to celebrate the fourth Paralympic Games in Heidelberg, in 1972. So great was their impact that a street was named after him in the city a year later.
in her book ‘Stoke Mandeville, Road to the Paralympics’, Joan Scruton MBE, who worked at Stoke Mandeville Hospital from 1942-1968, described Guttman as a “man with deep compassion and humanity that made his patients love and trust him: a man who could walk with kings nor lose the common touch.”
As the Paralympic Games became one of the world’s most influential sporting events, Loeffler adds her father would be “delighted”.
“He achieved so much and his legacy is the modern Paralympic Games, now the third biggest sporting event after the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup. I am immensely proud of what my father achieved in his lifetime.
“In his welcoming speech in 1948 he said: ‘I dream of the day when there will be Olympic Games for people with disabilities.’ His dream has come true and modern Paralympians are his legacy.”
Read more on International Paralympic Committee’s or WheelPower’s website.
Image credit: WheelPower
