Sports news, scores, analysis and opinion from the Guardian US
One can hardly understand sport if one does not begin with some conception of what sports are. Disabled sports also adaptive sports or parasports, are sports played by people with a disability, including physical and intellectual disabilities. As many of these are based on existing sports modified to meet the needs of people with a disability, they are sometimes referred to as adapted sports. However, not all disabled sports are adapted; several sports that have been specifically created for people with a disability have no equivalent in able-bodied sports. In competitive events, participants are graded or classified based on their "result" and often divided into groups of comparable performance, (e.g. gender, weight and age). In fact, the transition from Renaissance to modern Sports can be seen in a semantic shift; the word measure, which once connoted a sense of balance and proportion, began to refer almost exclusively to numerical measurements. Folk football, a wild no...