Elsevier, Intellectually Impaired People
The Ongoing Battle
2023, Pages 169-178
The world wars left hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians with permanent physical disabilities. As medicine improved, more and more survived. Today’s parasports for people that cannot compete with healthy athletes allow handicapped athletes to compete among each other. This helps give them a purpose in life and massively increases their quality of life. The International Sports Federation for Persons with Intellectual Disability (INAS), now Virtus, promotes since 1986 the participation of athletes with intellectual disabilities in elite sports. Overall, the development of disabled sport is an encouraging success story that has fundamentally changed one of the many aspects of disabled people’s lives.
