History

On 28 July 1948 – the day of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in London – the Stoke Mandeville Games were founded, and the first competition for athletes with a spinal cord injury took place on the hospital grounds in Stoke Mandeville.

In 1960, the International Stoke Mandeville Games were staged for the first time in the same country and city as the Olympic Games, i.e., in Rome. They went down in history as the "First Paralympic Games". The first Paralympic Winter Games took place in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, in 1976.

With the inclusion of other impairment groups over time and the close association of the Paralympic Movement with the Olympic Movement, The word "Paralympic" refers to "parallel" (from the Greek preposition "para") and "Olympic" to illustrate how the two movements exist side by side. "Paralympics" has been the official term of the Games since 1988.