Ludwig Guttmann had planned carefully for July 29, 1948. That day, King George VI opened the London Olympics at Wembley Stadium, an occasion delayed for years by World War II. An hour to the northwest, Guttmann had organized a wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where the neurologist ran a center for spinal injuries. The former event involved dignitaries mingling with thousands of athletes from around the world. The latter had a few people gather behind the hospital to watch 16 archers who had been injured in the British Armed Forces. And if the events looked unrelated, there was an obvious parallel to Guttmann, who had been deliberate in his scheduling.
The doctor saw his archers as athletes every bit as worthy of respect as those at the Olympics. He only hoped that one day, the rest of the world might, too. “Small as it was,” Guttmann later wrote, “it was a demonstration to the public that competitive sport is not the prerogative of the able-bodied but that the severely disabled, even those with a disablement of such magnitude of spinal paraplegia, can become sportsmen and women in their own right.”
