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Disabled Swimming

Natalie du Toit proved that disabled swimming is part of the sport of competitive swimming at the highest level when she competed against able-bodied swimmers in the Olympic 10km open water marathon event at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Damon Kendrick, who lost a leg due to a shark attack, was a Western Province provincial-level diver in the 1970's and still does open water swimming races in 2024. 

In 2000 Terence Parkin, a deaf swimmer from Natal, won a silver medal in the Olympic Games. 

In 2020, Alwyn Uys became the first paraplegic athlete to swim from Robben Island to Bloubergstrand. (Click here to see a trailer of his movie - Against All Odds: The Alwyn Uys Story.

Paraplegic sport was introduced in South Africa in 1963.

In 2024 the Paralympic Games were hosted in the Olympic venue following the conclusion of the Olympic Games. These Games build on a tradition started in 1948 at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England. Initially limited to archery, and only for wheelchair-bound wounded soldiers with spinal injuries, it became the Stoke Mandeville Games.  

From the 9th  Stoke Mandeville Games it became known as the Paralympic Games. It also became international, as the event was held at the Rome in  1960, it was open to non-soldiers as well. From the 1976 Paralympic Games, athletes with different disabilities besides wheelchair-bound were included for the first time at the Summer Paralympics.

An unnamed patient from Southern Rhodesia participated in the 1951 event, and a similarly anonymous South African competed in 1953 when swimming was also added to the list of sports. In 1955 South Africa sent a team and in 1956 won its first gold medal when Neville Cohen won the breaststroke final. (NOTE: No official records of this event seem to exist, although Neville Cohen claims the success in his autobiography "Mind if I sit?")

South African swimmers competed in the Paralympic Games since they were first staged in 1960, and continued until 1976. Rhodesian athletes competed in South Africa and at the Paralympics until they were excluded in 1972. 

Unfortunately little is known of the early Disabled Swimming Champions -  like Rhodesian Leslie Manson-Bishop, who won 6 gold medals at the Paralympic Games, and Riana van der Schyff - with three Paralympic gold medals and several world records to her name. Numerous world records were set by disabled swimmers from South Africa, like Hester du Preez, at the 1978 South African Games in Bloemfontein.

In 1972 Willie Bosch won the gold at the Paralympic Games and set a new world record

Stoke Mandeville Games 1956

Perhaps the most impressive participant at the Games, however, was Neville Cohen from South Africa. Neville had previously been a patient at Stoke Mandeville three years previously and had arrived in the UK in late April, having driven overland with a friend all the way from Johannesburg in South Africa.

According to his autobiography by the time Neville applied to take part in the Games all of the accommodation was already full and so he pitched his tent underneath the window of Dr Guttmann’s office.

https://paralympicanorak.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/stoke-mandeville-games-1956-the-italians-add-another-star-to-the-flag/