University of Utah Professor Larry Gerlach freely admits he knows less about the Paralympic movement than he should as organizer of a lecture series on the topic.
Lucky for Gerlach he found Gundrun Doll-Tepper, a Berlin-educated doctor who has dedicated most of her life to the furthering of disabled athletic competition.
In fact, U. health professor John M. Dunn credits Doll-Tepper for spearheading the effort to hold the Paralympics in the same city as the Olympics, which has happened regularly since the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul and continues for Salt Lake's Winter Games.
It was Doll-Tepper, then, whose Tuesday lecture traced the Paralympic movement's struggle to gain legitimacy from its infancy at the end of World War II.
At the first disabled games, in 1948, at Stoke Mandeville, England, winter sports officials in Switzerland and Austria refused to condone the competition. It wasn't until 1960 in Rome that the first "Olympic style" disabled summer games were held and even then the word "Paralympics" hadn't been invented.
The first winter version of these Games in1976 was dubbed The Winter Olympic Games for the Disabled, then The World Winter Games for Physically Disabled Persons and finally the Paralympics.
Besides the lack of knowledge there remain few opportunities for the severely disabled and there are few developing countries with money for training and equipment.
E-MAIL: bsnyder@desnews.com
