Organizers of the LA28 Paralympic Games have added an S14 Class mixed 400 medley relay to the schedule for the 2028 Games.
The Paralympic swimming schedule is generally less stable than the Olympic swimming schedule, with events shifting based on participation numbers. For example, the Paris 2024 Paralympics had 8 fewer individual events and 3 more relays than the Tokyo 2020 Games did.
By comparison, the Los Angeles Paralympics won’t drop any events, but will add a mixed 400 medley relay for the S14 Class. The S14 Class, for athletes with intellectual impairments, only had a mixed 400 free relay in Paris.
In total, there will be 71 men’s events and 64 women’s events at the LA28 Games, along with 7 mixed relays. That makes 142 total events: one more than Paris.
The Paralympic Games moved to only mixed relays beginning with the Tokyo Games.
Para Swimming runs from Thursday, August 17 to Saturday, August 26 at the temporary, open air Long Beach Aquatics Center.
There are 14 classifications within Para swimming. Class S14 is for athletes with intellectual impairments. Classes 11-13 are for athletes with visual impairments, with higher numbers being less severe. Classes 1-10 are for other physical impairments, with higher numbers being less severe.
I hope World Para Swimming also takes the opportunity to review the overall event program. The schedule has remained largely unchanged across the last three Paralympic Games, and there may be room for adjustments that better reflect the current depth and development of different classifications. Regularly reviewing and updating the program would help ensure that it continues to evolve alongside the sport.
SwimSwam should look into the growing fairness concerns around the S11 class in Para swimming.
The issue is not simply that athletes can be reclassified. Reclassification may be legitimate, especially in cases of progressive vision loss. The concern is what happens when swimmers who previously competed in S12 or S13 are later moved into S11, sometimes at an older age, and then immediately become dominant or break S11 world records.
This raises an important question: does the classification system only assess current visual function, or does it also consider the long-term sporting advantage of having learned swimming technique, starts, turns, spatial awareness and race skills while having usable vision?
S11 is meant to represent the most severe… Read more »
Athletes in all classes change. Our bodies change over time. There are amazing athletes that are born with their disability and amazing athletes who acquire their disability. If the proposal to have an onset date before a certain age like you see in the s14, having to have disability before age 18, you would not just lose s11, but many athletes in other classes would be affected!
Olympic swimming we see athletes climb the ranks as they age. We see the same in Paralympics with the biggest change being that the class can be shaken up any given time because people experience accidents, aging that affect their disability or other things that simply change the athlete enough to call for… Read more »