Celebration and Controversy Mark The Start Of Swimming At Rio Paralympics

Day 1 of the Paralympic swimming in Rio and no avoiding the two sides of a coin that will fall both ways all week long: heads and you have the likes of Britain’s Ollie Hynd and Bethany Firth among those celebrating gold, the focus on their achievements; tales and you have Australian Lakeisha Patterson taking gold for Australia and in so doing opening up the first of many a can of worms, with folk back home – in Britain and Australia – among those crying foul.

Hynd took the S8 400m freestyle before Bethany Firth claimed the S14 100m backstroke, a bronze in the same event for Jessica-Jane Applegate giving Britain a fine opening balance of five medals in the pool, Harriet Lee with silver in the SB9 100m breaststroke and Stephanie Millward with bronze in the women’s 400m freestyle.

Hynd has Muscular Dystrophy and notes the benfits of swimming beyond sporting challenge and reward:

“As a child I played football and swam for a local swimming club, but soon after my diagnosis, I decided to concentrate solely on swimming. The rest is history. Swimming is not only a fantastic sport, but a great aid for me and my condition and helps me through day to day tasks.”

When the women’s 400m free was over, American Jessica Long celebrated a silver in her fourth Paralympics, while Patterson clocked 4:40.33 for gold in a world record time of that took down Long’s 4:40.44 standard.

“I wish it went a little differently,” said Long, who is racing in nine events in Rio.

“I think the only hard part about that is adding time in one of my best races. But at the same time, I’ve overcome some really bad shoulder injuries. So I’m really proud that I finished, and even signed up for the race.”

Why did all that add up to controversy? Reclassification – is it simply a readjustment that lends fairness to a highly difficult environment when it comes to like-for-like competitive fairness; or is it a vehicle through which to cheat?

Britain’s Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson,  11-time Paralympic gold medal winner and now a peer in the House of Lords, has described it as “the equivalent of doping”. In a Sunday Times investigation, Bethany Woodward, a silver medallist for Britain at London 2012, withdrew from the Rio 2016 Paralympics stating:

“If I can’t compete… because they’ve brought in people who are not like me in terms of disability, what’s the point?”

Dishonesty at play? The charge is nothing new nor even newly reported, though many shy from the awkwardness of raising a difficult topic in a place where political correctness has an edge of human feeling travelling along a spectrum from sensitive to condescending and back.

We raise it for two main reasons beyond the obvious: the issue is being hotly debated behind the scenes; and the issue is one that makes paralympic swimming all the more difficult to cover than it already is (16 finals today – no, we won’t be covering all of that, let along doing so for the next 10 days).

Sources in Australia have been going backwards in forwards on the topic and imploring the International Paralympic Committee to investigate for the past two years – at least. Their charges extend to Patterson, Millward, Australia’s Maddison Elliott and several others. The charges are rejected and denied by those concerned and their federations.

At the Para World Championships in Glasgow last year, Elliott clocked 1:25.42 in the 100m backstroke on IPC classification assessment and was judged eligible to move from S9 to S8. For gold, Elliott clocked 1:17.93.

Not comparable with elite swimming but even in disability racing, that kind of leap in time is vast – and makes a vast difference to the result, of course.

Millward, who has multiple sclerosis, has also been reclassified. When in Berlin she swam a freestyle race six seconds down on best, she was shifted from S9 to S8. Not long after, in Sheffield in her first race in S8, she crushed the world 100m backstroke record and arrived in Rio with a 6sec margin of comfort over the nest fastest entry.

Classification in para swimming started out as medical, racers divided on specific conditions, such as brain damage, amputation and so forth, following the view of Sir Ludwig Guttmann, founder of the Paralympics at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, that exercise and competition could help the disabiled lead more fulfilling lives and even aid their recovery.

Of course, one brain injury is not like another, nor one amputation the same as another. And cerebral palsy, a condition that has suddenly appeared on the profiles of swimmers and others well into establiushed careers, may leave one person being able to lead a life close to ‘normal’, while anotger is severely handicapped.

Sport-specific classification was created to overcome such problems. And other problems emerged as a result of … well, human nature. In extremis, there was the entire Spanish basketball that faked disability to win (and then lose) paralympic gold at the onset of it all.

Dutch handbiker Monique van der Vorst claimed two silvers at Beijing 2008 but within years made a miraculous recovery, regaining sensation in her legs in events that led Der Spiegel, the leading German magazine, to write:

“Former competitors and neighbours have reported often seeing the athlete outside of her wheelchair — taking a shower, or even dancing.”

Der Spiegel also cited the case of a visually impaired Russian cross-country skier at the 2006 Winter Paralympics in Turin: “After she had reached the finish line with her escort, she turned her head to the display panel, which showed that she had won a …

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