Adaptive Sports

Tracy Schmitt, a quadruple amputee and accomplished sailor, skier and mountaineer spent years trying to convince dive instructors to take her on as a client. Tracy said, “They couldn’t imagine: no legs and no left arm, and my right arm is unique with one finger – how would I do it?”

Once she found an instructor, she excelled in the pursuit and is now “an advanced scuba diver approaching my one-hundredth dive,” she said. “The whole world goes silent and your worries just drift away,” she said, adding that “It was the first time I felt like myself again.”

Cody Unser, who developed transverse myelitis (TM), a rare autoimmune condition that left her paralyzed from the waist down at age 12, was introduced to scuba diving by her brother. She experienced an increase in lower-limb sensation while underwater, and took that to her doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Interested in researching this phenomenon more, a team of researchers and a group of veterans with spinal cord injuries traveled to the Cayman Islands for a scuba-diving trip in 2011. According to the news release from Johns Hopkins, the participants had “significant improvement in muscle movement, increased sensitivity to light touch and pinprick on the legs, and large reductions in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.”

To learn more about the exciting power of Scuba diving, and initiatives to make it more accessible to disabled people, read the article in Stars and Stripes.

Children and adults with disabilities can now take free swimming lessons and other training programs in several sports facilities in Athens, Greece. On March 16^th, the Greek capital announced that the Athens National Gymnastics Centre I. Fokianos and the municipal swimming pools in Serafeio, Kolokynthos and Grava will welcome disabled people between the ages of 5 and 40 every week from Monday to Saturday.

There, they will find professionals who are skilled at training people with developmental disorders (e.g., autism and down syndrome), neuromuscular disorders, and phobias stemming from past experiences with water. One can opt to participate in the program by themselves or in a group of 2-3 other students.

The Mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, said the program was an example of a commitment to “lay the foundations for a friendly city, without discrimination and social exclusion.” Bakoyannis continued, “The sports programme in the municipal swimming pools and in the Athens Gymnasium for our fellow citizens with disabilities is another action of the municipal authority that aims to improve their quality of life.”

To read more about this commitment to inclusion, see the full press release from the Mayor of Athens.

The European Disabled Golf Association (EDGA), in partnership with The DP World Tour, has launched the newly-named G4D (Golf for the Disabled) Tour, which will feature a minimum of seven tournaments in 2022.

Kipp Popert, the top-ranked player in the World Ranking for Golfers with a Disability, said “The EDGA has been doing amazing work for more than 20 years and this new collaboration with The DP World Tour will create opportunities for more golfers with a disability to showcase their talents and compete on a global stage.”

To learn more about this new disabled golf tour, read the article from the Irish Times.