How are “severities” of the disabilities of contestants in the Paralympics taken into account to make it a fair competition?

Question

Might be a very basic example but: I would assume that someone with 2 arms will swim faster than 1 arm and someone without legs will swim very differently than someone without arms.

How do they take this into account to decide who gets gold etc.

In: Other

Answer 1

There are ten different categories of impairment, and you compete in whichever one you “qualify” for. The ten categories are: impaired muscle power, impaired passive range of motion, loss of limb/limb deficiency, leg-length difference, short stature, hypertonic, ataxia, athetosis, visual impairment, and intellectual disabilities.

Within the ten categories, there are further divisions regarding the severity of the impairment that affect who you compete against. There’s a whole classification system that decides how impaired you are, and you’ll be sorted accordingly. They typically try to have it be as equal as possible; the Paralympics is not a free for all competition.