The Paralympics just ended, and if you’re didn’t watch you missed out on some really amazing sporting performances. Blind soccer! Incredible powerlifts (if you’re not a lifter, being able to move that much weight without any leg stabilization and drive is WILDLY impressive)! Archery without arms! Goalball! Murderball! Truly an embarrassment of athletic riches.
And also, along with all the amazing sports, the Paralympics offers a really interesting window into thinking about fairness — one that I think could help us have smarter conversations about the future of sports categories more generally.
Classifications galore
If you’ve watched any amount of Paralympic sport, you probably know that competition is divided in two ways: by gender (mostly, we’ll get into some exceptions below), and then again by physical disability1. The former you’re quite familiar with, but the latter is a lot more complicated.
Paralympic classifications are myriad and can be, at times, confusing. Each sport has its own rules and methods of lumping athletes together based on what the sport demands, and the types of physical disabilities there are. (This BBC guide does a good job of laying them all out.)
Bocce, for example, is only open to athletes who use wheelchairs and has four different classifications based on a person’s ability to manipulate the balls.
Swimming and track and field have far more classification levels. Here’s the BBC summary:
11-13: Track and field athletes who are visually impaired. Blind athletes compete in class 11, wear compulsory blindfolds and run with a guide runner. Athletes in class 12 are visually impaired but running with a guide is optional.
20: Track and field athletes who are intellectually impaired. Athletes in this class have difficulty with reaction time and memory recognition during an event.
31-38: Track and field athletes with cerebral palsy or other neurological conditions that affect muscle coordination and control. Athletes in classes 31-34 compete in a seated position (using a racing or throwing chair), while athletes in classes 35-38 compete standing.
40-41: Track and field athletes with short stature (also known medically as dwarfism).
42-44: Track and field athletes with lower limb impairments who do not use prosthesis.
45-47: Track and field athletes with upper limb impairments.
T51-54: Wheelchair track athletes. Athletes in class 51-52 are affected in both lower and upper limbs. T53 athletes have fully functioning arms but have no trunk function at all, while T54 athletes have partial trunk and leg functions.
F51-57: Wheelchair field athletes. Athletes in F51-54 classes have limited shoulder, arm and hand functions and no trunk or leg function, while F54 athletes have normal function in their arms and hands. In the F55-57 classes the trunk and leg function increases.
T61-64: Track and field athletes with lower limb impairments who use prosthesis.
For blind sports, like Blind Soccer and Goalball (two of my favorites), athletes are required to wear special masks. That’s because some folks who are legally blind, might still be able to see light or shapes. The masks are meant to level the playing field — to ensure that everybody competing is doing so with zero sight2.
Team sports are, in some ways, the most interesting of all. It’s unrealistic to expect to be able to field entire teams of sitting volleyball players, or murderball players, for each classification that track and field has. There simply aren’t enough people. But also, the game is more interesting when you have a mixture of abilities at play. And so most team sports have a system for keeping the teams balanced — each player is classified as a certain level, and the rules dictate which combinations of classifications are allowed on the court or field at any given time.
The rules of Murderball (officially known as wheelchair rugby), for example, say that “The sum of the classification points of a team’s players on the court must be eight (8) or less.” Seated volleyball doesn’t have points, but does separate athletes into two categories: minimally disabled (MD) and disabled (D). Teams can only have one MD on the court at any given time3.
The entire point of this whole set of complex rules and classifications, is fairness. It would be unfair to ask someone with no arms to race against someone with arms, for example. But is that always true? It turns out that in the last several years, there has been more and more of a push to rethink some of these classifications entirely.
Opening things up
I used to write a lot about prosthetic devices, and as part of that work I’ve been lucky enough to interview a handful of elite athletes like Scout Bassett. And in doing those interviews, I heard something interesting: the idea that maybe having a billion classifications like this is not the best way to do it. Maybe instead, athletes wondered aloud to me, they should simply divide things up by how fast or good someone is, and let the categories sort themselves out that way.
There are a few interesting reasons for this. The first, is that classifications might seem hard and fast, but they’re not. In many sports, classification is done by an official (here’s the official rules for murderball classification) and are subject to review over the years — which means that you can potentially be moved up or down in your classification based on an evaluation by a trained classifier.
This year, paralympian Nick Mayhugh made a video on his Instagram about how he was reclassified. In Tokyo, he raced as a T37 athlete and broke the world record in the 100 meters, but in 2022 he was regrouped into the T38 category. According to Mayhugh, the classifiers claimed he was “too fast” to be a T37. He says in the video that at the end of the classification interview they told him that they would “rather disadvantage me in a higher class than disadvantage an entire class because I outperform what their doctors think is possible for somebody with my severity of cerebral palsy.” (Sound familiar?)
This year in Paris, in the T38 category, Mayhugh didn’t race the 100 meters at all. He came in fifth in the long jump.
Mayhugh isn’t alone in being accused of being incorrectly classified. Christie Raleigh-Crossley, a swimmer, set a world record in her 50 freestyle heat. After the race, Raleigh-Crossley was accused of cheating, and not being “disabled enough” for her classification. “To be told online by all of these bullies that I’m somehow not as disabled as I appear just because I can swim faster than them is pretty devastating,” she told USA today. (Again, sound familiar?)
Another reason to reconsider more rigid categories is that in some events, there’s just not that much competition within a single classification. And if you’ve ever raced at any level you know that if you’re alone, it’s really hard to push yourself. Elite athletes are always looking for people just better than them to compete against and train with, to have someone to push them to the next level. If you don’t have that, it’s really hard to level up and get faster. And in some cases, athletes in some races and classifications simply don’t have it. In fact, some of those athletes have chosen to “compete up” — compete at a classification level that is considered “less impaired” than the one they were categorized as.
Most athletes I’ve spoken with about this are not arguing to completely get rid of classifications entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to have an amputee running on blades race against a person in a wheelchair. But they do wonder whether we need quite so many categories. What exact disadvantage does a blind person have compared to an amputee? In some cases, the winners at different categories are running very similar times. This year, for example, the men who won gold in the 1500 for the T13 classification (visually impaired) and the T20 classification (intellectual disability) finished within a second of one another.
Track and field organizers are starting to think about this too. This year, at the USA Track and Field Paralympic trials, they featured some “open” events for the first time ever — races that included a cross section of classifications. Heat one of the 100m mens race, for example, included Hunter Woodhall (T62), Derek Loccident (T64), Stirley Jones (T13), Korban Best (T47), Jonathan Gore (T64) and David Brown (T11). The men all finished within under a second second of each other.
After the race, Woodhall (who is the husband of Tara Davis, Olympic gold medalist long jumper) was asked about the open races, and said: “This is exactly what needs to happen. All of these events in the Paralympics, in my opinion, need to be ran together. High tide raises all ships so, if we can get in races with other fast guys and gals, run fast, roll fast, I think it’s great for everyone.” (Woodhall would go on to win his own gold in the 400m in the T62 classification).
Again, this isn’t to say that we should eliminate every classification and category. But it does offer another way of thinking about fairness and a level playing field. For me, it makes me think about our starting point. Should we start from the biological conditions that might beget a hypothetical result, and work from there? Or should we start with real results and work backwards?
We talked on Tested about the fact that, despite the way people describe these woman as superhuman and essentially male, no woman with a DSD is coming close to running elite male times. In fact, no so-called “DSD athlete” holds a women’s world record at any distance. If performance is what matters, then these women are well within the women’s category. They are beatable. They have all been beaten many times before.
But the rules are written largely based on a hypothetical — a mythical, yet to be seen, army of DSD women who are going to appear and start running times that absolutely blow their competitors out of the water. The rules are built around this theoretical possibility, rather than the real times and performances of the real women in the sport.
Similarly, disabled athletes are told that certain classifications come with pre-set, expected performances. The rules are based on the physical body, and what we expect it to be able to do, and not necessarily on what real athletes on the track, or in the pool, are capable of.
An online friend recently said something interesting to me about this: “It has been interesting to watch the Paralympics with the context of Tested in my mind. There’s such thought behind each sport’s rules about who can participate and how the competitors limitations are equalized… And then it struck me. Some of these fuckers think not being a man is a disability and they’re projecting the same need to make competition “fair” in the women’s divisions of the other Olympics. They think sex testing is no more than making sure we all wear the mask to play blind soccer”
I think this is a really interesting way of thinking about it. Not to get too Feminism Studies on you all at the end of an already long newsletter, but scholars like Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson have written extensively about the similarities between disability, race, and gender in the way that they are systems of exclusion. And remember, nobody is trying to “level the playing field” in the able bodied men’s category (beyond doping controls, which apply to all genders).
At the end of the day, this all comes back to something we talked about on Tested: the fact that “fairness” is inherently subjective. What is fair? To who? These are questions that the Paralympics grapples with every single day, and I think we can potentially learn something from their attempts as we think about the future of sport more generally.
FOOTNOTES
- What this means is that in many sports, there are multiple gold medal winners in an event — the 100m dash, for example, has 29 gold medal winners at the Paralympics, and only two (men’s and women’s) in the Olympics. ↩︎
- This is actually the only good example I can think of of anything akin to the current testosterone regulations — a policy that requires athletes to take an action to reduce a perceived unfair advantage. That said, there are some pretty clear differences between this and asking some women to regulate their testosterone. For one thing, every single competitor on the field in these blind sports must wear a mask. For another, putting a mask on is not equivalent to asking someone to take medication that changes their body’s biology and might have long term side effects. ↩︎
- MD can really mean truly minimally disabled. The United States, for example, has a player named Whitney Dosty. Dosty played professional standing volleyball all over the world (Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Korea, Azerbaijan and Turkey) until a bad ankle injury ended her pro standing career. Some have argued that she isn’t “disabled” per se, she simply can’t play professionally anymore on the bad ankle. But she qualifies as an MD player for the Paralympics. (I’m not personally interested in arguing about who “counts” as a disabled person — I recommend reading this piece by Frankie de la Cretaz about para athletes who aren’t deemed disabled enough to compete.) ↩︎