History
The first official Paralympic Games, was held in Rome in 1960. 400 athletes from 23 countries competed at the 1960 Games though only athletes in wheelchairs competed.
At the 1976 Summer Games athletes with different disabilities were included for the first time at a summer Paralympics. With the inclusion of more disability classifications, the 1976 Summer Games expanded to 1,600 athletes from 40 countries.
The 1988 Summer Paralympics were the first to use the same facilities as the Olympics of that year.
London, United Kingdom held the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will be the host city of the 2016 Summer Paralympics, becoming the first Latin American and South American city to host either the Summer or Winter Games.
Read more about this topic: Summer Paralympic Games
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)