My favourite Olympian was small, short-sighted and tubby. He could not run fast, swim or jump. He smoked a pipe, and everyone called him, “Poppa.” There is no evidence he ever participated in any form of competitive sport. But he profoundly understood, and changed, the meaning of the Olympic Games. Ludwig Guttmann, a pioneering German-Jewish neurosurgeon, invented the Paralympics. Guttmann knew that sport is about overcoming limitations, extending the physically possible, and acknowledging the extraordinary psychological benefit of sporting aspiration. He applied that understanding to the bodies and minds of men broken on the battlefields of World War II and in so doing, helped to revolutionise modern attitudes towards disability.
Poppa Guttmann knew about overcoming adversity. Born in a mining town in Upper Silesia in 1899, he worked after school in a hospital where he encountered a coalminer who had fractured his spine in an accident. When Guttmann began writing up notes on the young man, he was told: “Don’t bother, he’ll be dead in a few weeks.” And so he was.
That experience fused with another. As a medical student at Freiburg, Guttmann noticed the way that Jewish fraternities dedicated to sport gave their members extraordinary confidence and self-esteem. In 1933, Guttmann was fired from the medical faculty at Breslau University after Germany’s race laws prohibited Jews from treating “Aryans.” He became director of the neurological department of Breslau Jewish Hospital, but by 1939 the Gestapo was closing in. He smuggled most of his patients out of the hospital before they were rounded up, and then fled himself. Guttmann arrived at Harwich with his wife and children in March 1939.
The British medical establishment was quick to utilise his remarkable talents. In 1943 Guttmann was made director of a new spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville, a hospital created in anticipation of casualties from the opening of the Second Front. At that time, the life expectancy of spinal-injury patients was two years.
Over the next five years, Guttmann treated hundreds of wounded and paralysed soldiers. His program aimed to reintegrate these disabled men and women into normal British life and he placed particular emphasis on sport, both as physical rehabilitation and as a path to rediscovering self-discipline, self-respect and team spirit.
The London Olympics of the 1948, the first games since 1936, rehabilitated a competition gravely and almost fatally damaged by the war. Rationing was still in force, and London still bore the scars of battle, as did some competitors. Jim Halliday fought in the retreat from Dunkirk and was then captured by the Japanese. He emerged from a POW camp weighing four and a half stone. Three years later he won bronze in the weightlifting competition. The Hungarian champion marksman Karoly Takacs injured his right hand in a grenade blast: he learnt to shoot with his left and won the rapid-fire pistol gold.
But traditional attitudes to disability were still entrenched. Jack Dearlove, father of the future MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, was Cox of the British rowing eight in the 1948 Olympics. Dearlove had lost a leg in a car accident and walked on crutches. The impediment did not prevent him steering his team to a silver medal, but it was not considered the sort of thing the public would like to see. He was told not to take part in the Olympic procession.
Yet, precisely as Jack Dearlove sat in the stands on the first day of the Olympics, Ludwig Guttmann was organising the first games for people with disabilities. On July 28, 1948, 16 former soldiers (including two women) with spinal injuries gathered in wheelchairs on the lawn outside the Stoke Mandeville wards for an archery competition.
By 1950 the “Stoke Mandeville games” had 130 international competitors; in 1960 the first Paralympic games (the name was applied retrospectively) were held in Rome.
A simple, brilliant, humane idea that started on a Buckinghamshire lawn is now the second-largest sporting event in the world, with seven different classifications of athletes, in addition to the Special Olympics for athletes with intellectual disabilities and the Deaflympics.
Guttmann (by then “Sir Ludwig”) died in 1980, but the selection of Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, to compete in the Olympic 400 m race may be the final realisation of his vision: a disabled athlete so rehabilitated biomedical science that his disability is no longer relevant.
Pistorius’ victory over amputation is the culmination of a battle started by the disabled veterans of World War II. For the Paralympics, like the Olympics of 1948, represent a conquest over war and the suffering it brings. It is still the case today: a significant number of military personnel injured in Afghanistan and Iraq have been selected for the London 2012 Paralympics, including the cyclist Jon-Allan Butterworth, who lost his left arm in a rocket attack on Iraq, and the rower Nick Beighton, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2009. It is estimated that by 2016 as many as one in 20 of all Paralympics will be injured war veterans.
For Guttmann, the Paralympics was also a victory for real scientific research over Hitler’s perverted science. As Guttmann himself remarked: “since the Nazis drove out Jewish scientists, British science has got ahead of the Germans.”
Hitler not only wanted to eliminate Jews such as Guttmann, but also the disabled people he championed. In 1933, the Nazis had begun the forced sterilisation of the disabled, depicted as “useless eaters” with “lives unworthy of living.” Some 275,000 disabled people were murdered at “euthanasia centres” under the Nazi’s unspeakable T4 program.
But history has a sense of irony. By driving out this Jewish doctor, Hitler unintentionally set in train a course of events that would eventually led to the Paralympics, an institution that has done more than any other to undermine negative images of disability across the world. Poppa Guttmann ran a long, hard race against prejudice, but he won in the end.
Source: McIntyre, Ben (30 August 2012). The Press. Page 6.
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