The Accomplishments Of Women With Disabilities In Sports

The Accomplishments of Women with Disabilities in Sports

Success in disability sport (i.e., become an elite disabled athlete) enables people with impairments to actively resist dominant ideologies describing the impaired body as defective and disabled people as weak, inactive, and dependent (Huang and Brittain, 2006). Sport is a context that facilitates both, resistance and empowerment beyond merely the sporting experience. They feel physically empowered by their exceptional health and fitness achieved by their regular sport practice. They consider it an advantage to be physically robust and energetic because it helps their daily movements and allows them to pursue other things. Furthermore, these disabled athletes are empowered by the feeling

Over the years, the available opportunities have increased not only in number and in type as well. Today, girls and women with disabilities are enjoying recreational activities such as mountain climbing and wheelchair dancing as well as highly competitive sports such as wheelchair racing, volleyball, goal all, skiing, and much more (DePauw, 1997). Furthermore in area of sport, the first principle of the Brighton Declaration on Women and Sport calls for equity and equality in society and sport; it stated that equal opportunity to participate in sport whether for the purpose of leisure and recreation, health promotion or high performance, is the right of every women, regardless of race, color, language, religion, creed, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, national or social

Female athletes with disabilities have gained greater visibility and acceptance as athletes alongside their male counterparts. But, lack of representation of women, both as athletes and as administrators, in disability sport continues to hamper efforts at increasing awareness of issues unique to the female athlete with a disability. Systemic support for the female athlete must be identified, increased and reinforced by the governing bodies of the disability sport movement (Olenik et al., 1995). This support includes sensitivity to financial, time, and cultural constraints specifically experienced by women with a disability who have little institutional or interpersonal backing in general. Failure to sustain the participation of today’s female athlete with a disability will result in a decrease in participation numbers (Olenik et al.,