SWIMMING
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Swimming is one of the most popular adaptive sports because of its accessibility. Fortunately, you can practice at a public pool, and only need a pair of goggles and duct tape. It is important that you have someone who can swim guide you, because as we learned through our simulation, it is easy to swim into the sides of the pool. At Brown, you can try swimming in the lanes during public pool hours, or have someone on the swimming/diving or water polo team rent out the diving well. We did this because it was a great way to get a perspective on how blindness would affect our directional capabilities. Another great place to try out this sport is at a YMCA location near you. Many YMCA’s offer swimming classes for all children.
The IPC pool size is a regular 8-lane 50-meter pool with athletes competing in heats. Swimmers can start on the starting platform (going off the diving blocks), or they can start already in the water, with the start signal being both audible and visual. The uniform is a bathing suit and goggles--there cannot be any other devices to aid the swimmers. In blind swimming, competitors must wear blackened goggles so that those with partial sight are not at an advantage.
Paralympic swimmers fall into six categories: amputee, cerebral palsy, visual impairment, spinal cord injuries, psychological diagnoses, and others. An athlete’s classification may change for different swimming strokes because the nature of their disability may affect their performance a particular stroke. For blind swimmers, there is an assistant “tapper” who taps swimmers when they are nearing the wall. In addition, all blind swimmers’ goggles are also blacked out. Depending on how their disabilities affect how they swim different strokes, swimmers may be classified differently for different strokes.
For the strokes themselves, there are adaptive ways in which swimmers with disabilities can start or turn. While non-adaptive competitive swimming requires two-hand touches at the wall for some starts or turns, adaptive swimming rules allow swimmers who are unable to perform two-hand touches to start or turn with one hand. In some strokes, such as breaststroke and butterfly, should swimmers be unable to push off the wall with their legs, they use their arms to attain their appropriate positions.
RULES & REGULATIONS