With hundreds of different disabilities represented at the Paralympics, who decides which athletes compete against each other?

Published Aug 27, 2024  •  14 minute read

French athletes and France's paralympic flag bearers Nantenin Keita and Alexis Hanquinquant and French Paralympic athlete Marie-Amelie Le Fur hug as they hold the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, 2024, as the Louvre Museum and the Pyramid are seen in the background. Photo by Photo by OLIVIER MORIN / AFP /Getty Images

Defending S7 Paralympic gold medalist Danielle Dorris is swimming for another chance at the podium. First-time Paralympian Alexandre Hayward, who took the Para cycling track by storm at the road world championships in 2022, now looking for Olympic victory in the C3 races in Paris. Cindy Ouellet, one of the few athletes in the world to compete in both the summer and winter Paralympics, is preparing to storm the court as a 3.5-point member of the women’s wheelchair basketball team:

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With so many extraordinary Canadian athletes preparing to compete in the 2024 Paralympic Games, sports fans across the country will have a lot to cheer for in the weeks ahead.

But what do all these letters and numbers — S7, C3, 3.5 and dozens of others — mean? How do they affect team strategy, or decide which athletes will compete against one another in this year’s games? And what goes on behind the scenes, to make sure Paralympic athletes are facing off in fair competition?

Here’s what you need to know about athlete classification at the 2024 Paralympic Games.

What is classification?

Para athletes have all sorts of different disabilities, which affect their bodies in different ways. Some athletes are paralyzed; some are blind or have partial vision loss; some have conditions that affect their joints or muscles. 

If all these athletes were competing against each other in the same events, the Paralympic games wouldn’t be very fair or exciting to watch, says Andrea Bundon, associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia.

“The idea is to group athletes based on function, so that athletes are competing against others of similar abilities and the result will be based on their hard work and skill,” Bundon explained. “At the Paralympic Games, you’re going to see a lot of very evenly-matched athletes, with uncertain outcomes and underdog stories and gold-medal champions trying to defend their title one more time. 

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“The classification system is a really important part of that, because it ensures the athletes are in suitable competition classes. It means the outcome is uncertain, and it will be determined by hard work and skill and the serendipitous things that happen on the day, rather than having sports where the result is just determined by who is the least impaired athlete in the group.”

Ottawa fencer Trinity Lowthian will be representing Canada in the Paralympics in Paris at the end of August. Photo by JULIE OLIVER/Postmedia

For example, in para badminton, athletes are sorted into different competition groups based on whether or not they use a wheelchair and how well they can use their legs and core (WH1 and WH2), whether they play standing but have leg impairments or balance problems (SL3 and SL4), whether their disabilities affect their arms (SU5) or whether they have short stature (SH6) — six different classification groups for a single Paralympic sport.

Nathan Bragg, communications coordinator for BC Wheelchair Sports, says these groupings are all about “creating a fair and equitable competition.”

“In sports like athletics (also known as ‘track and field’), you compete against people with the same type of impairment as you,” Bragg said. “If you’re a wheelchair racer and you have paralysis or loss of muscle power, you’ll be classified in the 50s. And if you’re someone like me — I have cerebral palsy, which is a coordination impairment — that’s classified differently; I have spasticity and difficulty controlling my movements, and athletes with that range of impairment are put into the 30s. So if I was a wheelchair racer, I wouldn’t be racing against someone with a spinal cord injury.”

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The letter-number combination usually indicates which sport an athlete is competing in, what type of disability or impairment they have, and how much their disability affects their performance in the sport.

“Generally speaking, lower numbers mean you’ll have someone who has more physical impairment and more limitation in the sorts of movements they can do,” Bragg said. “But it’s not based on athletic skill. It’s based on what physical movements, abilities or level of vision that an athlete may or may not have.”

At first, the classification system might seem complicated — especially to viewers tuning into the world of para sport for the first time since the last Paralympic games. But just like the non-disabled Olympics, the Paralympics are a great chance to learn about the rules and strategies of all sorts of different sports by watching the best athletes in the world show how it’s done, and there is no pop quiz at the end.

“I know Paralympic sport — and, specifically, the classifications in Paralympic sport — can seem really intimidating,” Bundon said. “There is a bit of a message out there that this is too complicated, too intricate, for the average viewer who tunes in every few years; they won’t understand, they just won’t be able to get into watching the Paralympic Games.

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“But we watch a lot of sports that have very complicated and specific rules, and many of us enjoy that — and it’s also exciting, to learn about an event and become more of a knowledgeable viewer.” 

Brazil’s Bruna Costa Alexandre competes against Germany during the quarterfinal of the women’s team (class 6-10) table tennis in the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games at Riocentro in Rio de Janeiro on September 14, 2016. Photo by (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)

Is classification unique to para sport?

Well, yes and no.

On one hand, the specific ways these athletes are classified, based on their disabilities and level of function, is a particular feature of the para sport world.

But at every level of sport and competition — for disabled and nondisabled athletes alike — having some type of stratification, separation or competition grouping is very common.  

“Think about if you’re watching Olympic boxing or Olympic wrestling,” Bragg said. “People are put into weight classes, so you know they’re competing against people of similar sizes and abilities. In para sport, classification is like that, but based on impairment and disabilities.”

In a similar example, the Olympic swimmers competing in the 50m races are usually not the same swimmers competing in the much longer 1500m races — both races are incredible feats of speed, endurance and physicality, but in very different ways. 

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Para sport classification just adds another factor to the mix. 

“If you’re watching an S9 or S10 race (para swimming events for physically disabled athletes with less severe impairments), they’ll be incredibly fast,” Bragg said. “And if you switch to an S4 race (a para swimming event for physically disabled athletes with more severe impairments), they’ll probably be a little slower.

“But that doesn’t mean that those people competing in S4 are any less athletic or that they put in fewer hours. They just have a different classification, based on the movements and abilities they have.”

Who classifies athletes?

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the governing body responsible for the Paralympic Games, is ultimately responsible for making sure the classification system is working properly.

In practice, the IPC delegates a lot of that responsibility to each sport’s international governing body to set the standard for that sport’s classification system. 

The international sport governing bodies then, in turn, depend on national sport organizations to make sure their own country’s athletes get classified and that their country has enough trained classifiers to make that happen. 

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In Canada, one of those classifiers is Clary Stubbert, a former member of the Canadian wheelchair basketball team.

“I was asked to start classifying after my playing career,” Stubbert recalled. “They want to have athletes involved in classification, because we know the game, and I’ve been classifying now for another 25 years.”

Over the decades, Stubbert has worked alongside other experts and professionals from athletic and medical backgrounds — doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and former players are all highly-represented on these panels — to classify approximately 200 wheelchair basketball athletes from across Canada. 

National competitions make for busy days for Stubbert and his colleagues, who want to make sure everyone gets properly classified before the tournament begins. That also means he’s evaluating players of all ages, from enthusiastic young kids to recently-disabled adults who have just found their way to para sport after an illness or injury. 

“We usually have a panel of three classifiers, and we watch the teams practice,” Stubbbert said. “We’re told beforehand which teams have players that need classifying, and we watch those individual players. It’s all functional — in basketball, the skills we’re looking for are wheeling, rebounding, shooting, dribbling, how well you can accept contact. If someone bangs into you, does your body flop forward, or are you able to remain stable in your chair?”

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Along with that type of ‘in-sport’ assessment, classification usually also involves a ‘bench test’ away from the field of play.

“Classifiers examine your movements, they test spasticity, they measure how much of a limb an amputee has left,” Bragg said. “They’re using objective scales.” 

Then, on the court, classifiers like Stubbert are looking for the ways an athlete’s disability affects how they play the game.

“Classification is a science, in terms of what the body is able to do and what functions you have,” Stubbert explained. “But there is an art to it, and that is the ability of the athletes: There are class ones and then there are class ones, the folks that are really athletically inclined and develop their skills so much and work so hard that they become superior. Which is why, I suppose, they make the national teams.”

What does it mean to get classified?

For para athletes, getting their classification affects everything from what types of sports and events they can compete in, to what level they’re able to compete at.

“Certain sports (like swimming and athletics) are open to a wider range of classifications, and have a place for pretty much everybody on the scale,” said Bragg. “Other sports have tighter eligibility rules, where you have to have a certain degree of impairment to class, or enough function to be able to compete.”

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For example, Bragg explained, Paralympic athletes competing in goalball have to have less than 10 per cent visual acuity, while athletes in wheelchair rugby need to have an impairment that affects both their upper and lower limbs. 

“There are eligibility requirements around not letting people in that have too much function to participate in those sports — which some people might think is a wild idea,” Bragg said. “But when you look at how some of these sports were created, it was to create opportunities for people who had a really difficult time competing in some of the other options that existed out there.”

New Brunswick triathlete Kamylle Frenette will compete for Canada at the 2024 Summer Paralympics in Paris on Sept 1. Photo by Submitted by Kamylle Frenette

Though local para sport teams tend to be open to disabled and non-disabled athletes alike, every athlete representing their country at the Paralympic level has to be “classifiable” — that is, they have to have a type of disability or impairment that is recognized by the Paralympics and their sport’s governing association.

Because of this, getting classified can be a moment of joy and empowerment. That’s especially true for athletes who had gravitated to para sport without even knowing they were disabled in the first place, like Stubbert’s own daughter.

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“My daughter played wheelchair basketball with me as an able-bodied person throughout her junior and high-school years,” recalled Stubbert. “Now, we knew she wasn’t able to run properly — it doesn’t affect her day-to-day living, but she couldn’t compete in able-bodied sports. Her gait was a little off, and there were a few things like that — so eventually we took her to a physiotherapist, and sure enough, there was an issue with her joints that made her eligible to play wheelchair basketball.

“The moment we heard that, the both of us jumped for joy. ‘Oh my God, you’re classifiable! You’re disabled! It’s wonderful!’ She was so excited about the whole situation, and one of my proudest moments was being able to cheer her on at the world championships.”

How will athletes’ classifications affect team strategy at the Paralympics?

In sports like wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby, athletes with a wide range of different classifications all play together on the same team.

But deciding which players’ mix of classifications will be represented on the court has major implications for the kind of game the team is about to play. 

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In wheelchair basketball, players are classified on a points system ranging from 1 to 4.5, where 1 is the most impaired and 4.5 is the least.

The game is played with five players on the court, but those five players’ total classification points can’t add up to more than 14. So the most successful teams are always looking for the right mix of gameplay and physical ability that will let each player do what they do best.

“I’m a 3.5, and I have spina bifida, so I have no muscle below the knee on either leg and I’m missing a hip muscle on my left side,” Stubbert said. “So I have difficulty bending over and picking up the ball on the left side, but I could do it quite well on the right. A typical class 1, on the other hand, can’t rotate their body to catch a pass with two hands off the wheels. And a class 4 or 5 would have good abdominal muscles and good function.”

Similarly, in wheelchair rugby, the points scale ranges from 0.5 to 3.5, but the total on-court point value for each four-person team can’t add up to more than eight.

“This is one of the really cool, unique aspects of para sport where your tactics and strategy are affected by the combinations of players you have on the court,” Bragg said. “Everybody has a role, from the person with the least amount of function all the way up to the person with the most.”

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In rugby, Bragg says there are two types of lineups a team can field — a ‘balance’ lineup (where all the players have similar classifications), or a ‘high-low’ lineup (where two athletes have a lot of function and ability relative to the sport, and two athletes are at the lowest end of the classification scale).

“People often overlook those athletes at the bottom end of the scale, but they play a really important role on the court — they’re kind of like the offensive linemen in football,” Bragg said. “They’re the ones blocking, creating holes and trying to take out somebody of a higher point value to give their teammates an advantage.”

In wheelchair rugby, a mixed-gender sport, having a female athlete on the court also nets your team a 0.5 point increase to your total classification point limit. 

“That’s intended to incentivize finding those female athletes where they count as a 2.5, but they play like a 3-point player,” said Bundon. “I see a lot of potential in that classification system in terms of promoting gender balance in the game, as well as highlighting some of the phenomenal athleticism of some of the female athletes, though the number of women who actually go to the Paralympics for wheelchair rugby is still very low. 

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“But where I’m hopeful is that we’re seeing more female athletes come up through the development squads. So in terms of incentivizing nations to find, identify, train, recruit and invest in female athletes, it has potential.”

The Agitos, the symbol of the Paralympic Games on the Arc de Triomphe during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on July 26, 2024 in Paris, France.Scott Stinson: Why you need to be watching the Paralympics Photo by (Photo by Luis Robayo-Pool/Getty Images)

How accurate are athletes’ classifications?

From local clubs to the Paralympic Games, classification is not a perfect system. 

“Bodies are not easily classified,” said Bundon. “There is so much complexity. And there will always be bodies that are not easily put into any box.”

Some athletes have progressive or variable disabilities; an athlete can find themself right on the border between one class and another.

“This is one of the things that gets discussed a lot within para sport,” Bragg said. “There are always some people who are on the top of one class and other people who are on the bottom of it.”

In some cases, factors as simple and unpredictable as the temperature of the room, gym or pool where an athlete was classified impacted their ability to play the sport or do the bench tests on that day.

At the Paralympics, Bundon says frustration amongst competitors and fans over the porous nature of these categories often bubbles up — which leads to athletes getting accused of cheating, faking or exaggerating their disabilities for a competitive advantage. 

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“I tend to take a more generous view: It’s not so much that athletes are being put in the wrong class, but that there are always going to be athletes at the margins or the boundaries,” Bundon said. “And the idea that athletes are intentionally misrepresenting themselves, that they might ‘play up’ their impairment during classification to have an unfair advantage, I’m skeptical of that. 

“It does happen, but in my research, I have never seen evidence of athletes trying to cheat the classification system. I have, however, found a lot of people who will try to portray some of these athletes as having cheated — when actually, it’s the classification system that failed the athlete.”

Bundon says these accusations tend to get particularly intense when an athlete is declassified altogether, and is no longer eligible to compete at the Paralympic level at all.

But Bundon says those decisions often happen for reasons outside an athlete’s control, like when new medical tests are introduced to the classification process. 

“Athletes who have been declassified (are) treated horribly,” Bundon said. “They’re made to feel like cheats and compared to people who had been doping. People question their right to identify as disabled. Some people question their own disability identity; whether or not they should be thinking of themselves as disabled, when there was nothing that had changed about their actual impairment. 

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“So we need a bit of grace in understanding that this system is imperfect, and that does not mean that athletes are trying to cheat it.

“These are different bodies — and, in some cases, completely different sports — than you will see at the Olympic Games. But what these athletes are doing is exceptional. They are at the top of their game.”

So rather than focusing on an athlete’s classification above all else, Stubbert says the best way to watch the games is to keep the attention on all the world-class athleticism and unique strategy that make up the Paralympic Games. 

“When it comes down to actually watching the Games, just enjoy the skill level of these folks and the athleticism that’s involved in what they’re doing,” he said. “The competitiveness in these sports is fantastic. I think people will soon forget about classification when they’re watching the actual game, and be enthralled by the athleticism.”

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