Impact of the 2018 World Para Swimming classification revision on the race results in international Paralympic swimming
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Luca Puce1 · Lucio Marinelli1 Carlo Trompetto1
· Ilaria Pallecchi2
· Laura Mori1 ·
1
Department of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Ophthalmology, Genetics, Maternal and Child Health, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy 2 CNR-SPIN, Physics Department, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy
Impact of the 2018 World Para Swimming classification revision on the race results in international Paralympic swimming events Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi. org/10.1007/s12662-019-00637-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Introduction International Paralympic swimming events are organized according to the World Para Swimming classification, which aims at grouping athletes into sport classes to ensure that the impact of impairment is minimized and sporting excellence determines which athlete or team is ultimately victorious. Athletes with different kinds of health conditions may compete within the same class. Indeed, the need for equity must be balanced by the need of limiting excessive fragmentation, which would result in a multitude of parallel events and medals and limited number of athletes eligible to compete in each one. Appropriateness of classification procedures is a major and widely debated issue, and related rules and regulations have undergone changes over time in successive editions of Paralympic events. Indeed, flawed or unfair classification methodologies and criteria could undermine the values fostered by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) (IPC, 2015), have detrimental psy-
chological impact on confidence, selfefficacy, and self-perceived quality of life of individual athletes (Blauwet & Willick, 2012), discourage participation, undermine legitimacy of success, and convey a negative perception about Paralympic sport to the general public. The presently on-going Swimming Functional Classification System, introduced in 1990, is detailed in the “World Para Swimming Classification Rules and Regulations” document (World Para Swimming Classification Rules and Regulations, 2018). According to this system, each athlete is required to attend an evaluation session, whereby he/she is assigned a specific class, made up of a prefix (“S”, “SB” or “SM”), indicating the swimming style, and a number, ranging from 1 to 10 for physical impairment for increasingly severe activity limitation. In view of improving classification criteria, the impact of specific impairments or health conditions on the biomechanical and physiological determinants of swimming performance was investigated in several studies (Bentley, Phillips, McNaughton, & Batterham, 2002; Burkett, Mellifont, & Mason, 2010; Chatard et al., 1992; Dingley, Pyne, & Burkett, 2014; Evershed, Frazer, Mellifont, & Burkett, 2012; Oh, Burkett, Osborough, Formosa, & Payton, 2013; Pelayo, Sidney, Moretto, Wille, & Chollet, 1999; Schega, Kunze, & Daly, 2006 ). As a consequence
of such studies and of analyses of the race outcomes, the past classification methods have raised some concerns (Burkett et al.
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