Parasports
sports practiced by disabled people
Parasports are sports played by people with a disability, including physical and intellectual disabilities. Some parasports are forms of adapted physical activities from existing non-disabled sports, while others have been specifically created for persons with a disability and do not have a non-disabled equivalent. Disability exists in four categories: physical, mental, permanent and temporary. At a competitive level, disability sport classifications are applied to allow people of varying abilities to face similar opposition.
Etymology
The term "parasports" arose as a portmanteau of the words paraplegic and sports. Other terms for the concept include adapted sports, adaptive sports, disability sports, and disabled sports. The term "Paralympic sports" may also be used interchangeably with parasports, though technically this only refers to sports contested at the Paralympic Games.
Organization and history
Organized sport for athletes with a disability is generally divided into three broad disability groups: the deaf, people with physical disabilities, and people with intellectual disabilities. Each group has a distinct history, organization, competition program, and approach to sport.
Hearing impairment
Formal international competition in deaf sport began with the 1924 Paris Silent Games, organized by the Comité International des Sports des Sourds, CISS (The International Committee of Sports for the Deaf).
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as sports practiced by disabled people. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q814517. The Library of Congress control number is sh85126930. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parasports” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.