SABINE RADTKE & GUDRUN DOLL-TEPPER

A cross-cultural comparison of talent identification and development in Paralympic sports

Perceptions and opinions of athletes, coaches and officials

August 2014

Dr. Sabine Radtke ⋅ Prof. Dr. Gudrun Doll-Tepper

Nachwuchsgewinnung und -förderung im paralympischen SportEin internationaler Systemvergleich unter Berücksichtigung der Athleten-, Trainer- und Funktionärsperspektive

2014 | 02 N A M E D E R S C H R I F T E N R E I H E

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Dr. Sabine Radtke leitet derzeit als Vertretungsprofessorin den Arbeitsbereich Sozialwissenschaften des Sports an der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte lie-gen u. a. in den Bereichen Paralympischer Sport sowie Inklu-sion im Sport.

Prof. Dr. Gudrun Doll-Tepper ist Hochschullehrerin an der FU Berlin; sie leitet den Arbeitsbereich Integrationspädagogik, Be-wegung und Sport und forscht seit vielen Jahren im Bereich des Sports von Menschen mit einer Behinderung.

Spitzenleistungen sowohl im paralympischen als auch im olympischen Sport sind das Ergebnis systematischer nationaler Förderpolitik, die in die gesell-schaftlichen, kulturellen und sportstrukturellen Rahmenbedingungen eines Landes eingebettet ist. Im Hinblick auf den zentralen Bereich von Nachwuchs-gewinnung und -förderung sind in vielerlei Hinsicht Unterschiede zwischen Nichtbehinderten- und Behindertensport auszumachen. Im vorliegenden Buch werden im Rahmen einer empirischen Analyse die Systembedingungen für eine erfolgreiche Nachwuchsgewinnung und -förderung in fünf paralympi-schen Sportarten in den Ländern Kanada, USA und UK untersucht. Dabei wird die Perspektive von Athleten, Trainern und Funktionären aus den drei Ländern berücksichtigt.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the numerous partners and colleagues who have provided extraordinary support to our work.

We are grateful to the Federal Institute of Sport Science (BISp)1 in Bonn and the Fürst Donnersmark Foundation in Berlin for supporting this research.

The research would not have been possible without the 64 athletes, coaches and officials we interviewed across the UK, Canada and the USA. Their contribution and the dialogue we had with them greatly enriched our analysis and the book we have now written. Many thanks to Julia Reiner and Jeff Purchla who provided excellent transcriptions of the interviews throughout the research.

We would also like to thank all those who have participated in our online survey. We are grateful for statistical support provided by fu:stat at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Finally we would like to thank Gerald Nixon and Verena Pflieger for the translation of the research report into English and Jeff Purchla for the translation of the German version of the questionnaire into English. Sabine Radtke & Gudrun Doll-Tepper

1 Grant number: IIA1-080404/10-11

Contents List of tables .................................................................................................................................................................. 3

List of figures ................................................................................................................................................................. 4

1 Introduction and issues ................................................................................................................................... 5

1.1 Germany’s structural disadvantages as regards talent recruitment and development in high-performance disability sports .......................................................................................................................... 5

1.2 Advantages of foreign systems ......................................................................................................................... 6

2 Overview of the state of research ................................................................................................................... 8

2.1 International comparison of elite sport funding, taking special account of measures to recruit and develop new talent .......................................................................................................................................... 8

2.2 The current controversy between sports scientists and sports practitioners over the structure of talent development in German high-performance sport ................................................................................. 9

2.3 The state of research on high-performance disability sport ..........................................................................10

3 The special features of high-performance disability sport in the context of talent identification

and development ..........................................................................................................................................12

4 Defining the aim and the issues underlying the study ..................................................................................15

5 The selection of countries .............................................................................................................................16

6 The challenges of international comparative research ................................................................................18

7 Theoretical frame of reference ......................................................................................................................21

8 Methodological procedures ..........................................................................................................................23

8.1 Research phase 1: document analysis and exploratory interview study ........................................................23

8.2 Research phase 2: online survey ....................................................................................................................32

9 Results ...........................................................................................................................................................37

9.1 Description of the overall structures of high-performance disability sport in the three countries taking into special consideration the structures of talent identification and development .....................37

9.2 Results of the qualitative interview study .....................................................................................................54

9.2.1 Aims ..................................................................................................................................................54

9.2.2 Human Resources ..............................................................................................................................68

9.2.3 Financial resources ............................................................................................................................81

9.2.4 Infrastructural resources, notably in terms of cooperation with schools and rehabilitation centres ........................................................................................................................94

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Contents

9.2.5 Commitments .................................................................................................................................106

9.2.6 Evaluation: current challenges and the need for action .................................................................124

9.3 Results of the online survey .........................................................................................................................126

9.3.1 Reliability analysis ...........................................................................................................................126

9.3.2 Regression analysis .........................................................................................................................139

9.3.3 Comparison of the quality features across countries .....................................................................145

10 Concluding discussion of the results ..........................................................................................................156

10.1 The structures of disability sport in the countries under study – a comparison ...........................................156

10.2 Quality features of Talent Identification and Talent Development in the three countries .......................156

10.2.1 Comparison of aims .........................................................................................................................156

10.2.2 Comparison of human resources.....................................................................................................157

10.2.3 Comparison of financial resources ..................................................................................................159

10.2.4 Comparison of infrastructural resources .........................................................................................160

10.2.5 Comparison of commitments .........................................................................................................161

10.2.6 Comparison of current challenges ...................................................................................................162

10.3 Investigation of the quality features of Talent Identification and Talent Development in the three countries ......................................................................................................................................163

10.3.1 Investigation of the internal consistency of ten item batteries .....................................................163

10.3.2 Explanatory factors of the result of talent identification and development ..................................163

10.3.3 Comparison of the quality features across countries .....................................................................164

10.3.4 Country-specific differences at the item level ................................................................................164

11 Practical recommendations ........................................................................................................................163

References ................................................................................................................................................................166

Appendix A: Mean value of all items ......................................................................................................................173

Appendix B: Category system for the qualitative interview study (overarching categories) ...............................181

Appendix C: Questionnaire used for the online survey of officials, coaches and athletes (here: athletes’ questionnaire) ...................................................................................................................183

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List of tables

Table 1 Figures of surface area, population and number of persons with a disability in the three

countries discussed ............................................................................................................. 19

Table 2 Interview group 1: officials (N = 22) .................................................................................... 26

Table 3 Interview group 2: national coaches (N = 14) ..................................................................... 27

Table 4 Interview group 3: national squad athletes (N = 28) ........................................................... 27

Table 5 Specified type of disability: congenital or acquired ............................................................ 28

Table 6 Gender distribution in the sample of athletes according to country .................................. 28

Table 7 Structure of the questionnaire (with the number of items per issue in brackets) .............. 33

Table 8 Examples of item statements in the individual issue complexes dealt with ....................... 34

Table 9 Characterisation of the sample according to nationality .................................................... 35

Table 10 Characterisation of the sample according to function ........................................................ 35

Table 11 Characterisation of the sample according to sex ................................................................ 35

Table 12 Characterisation of the sample according to sport (not specified: N = 36) ......................... 36

Table 13 LTAD programme for athletes with disabilities: stages/contents & aims ........................... 56

Table 14 Funding sources of Canadian NGBs for development/elite sport ....................................... 84

Table 15 Funding sources of elite Canadian athletes (as of 2010) .................................................... 85

Table 16 Funding of British NGBs for high-peformance sport (as of 2011) ....................................... 88

Table 17 Funding sources for British national squad athletes (in 2011) ............................................ 89

Table 18 Funding of US-American high-performance sport .............................................................. 93

Table 19 Key contents of the five-point plan devised by the Canadian expert network for all

sports ................................................................................................................................. 112

Table 20 Key challenges currently facing talent identification and development according to

the members of the three groups of the sample ............................................................. 124

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List of figures

Fig. 1 Research phases ................................................................................................................. 23

Fig. 2 Canadian (high-performance) disability sport system: key organisations & programmes 44

Fig. 3 British (high-performance) disability sport system: key organisations & programmes ....... 48

Fig. 4 US-American (disability) sport system ................................................................................. 53

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1 Introduction and issues

In recent decades the Paralympic movement has undergone significant development throughout the world (cf. Howe, 2008; Thomas & Smith, 2009). The extensive progress achieved in athletic performance is to be observed in the shape of ever new world records and is attributable to improved knowledge with regard to training methods and their implementation in training practice as well as to substantial advances in materials science. Generally, too, a progressive professionalisation of international disability sport is observable, accompanied by a large increase in the interest and attention given by the general public to the sports of athletes with disabilities (cf. Doll-Tepper, 2002; Gilbert & Schantz, 2008; Innenmoser, 2002; Keuther, 2000; Quade, 2000; Scheid, Kuckuck & Simen, 2000).1 Top performances in disability sport – just like those in able-bodied sport – can be regarded as the result of national policies of support and development which, in turn, are embedded in the general socio-cultural framework of a nation along with its sports structure (cf. Brittain, 2006; Emrich & Pitsch, 2008; Houlihan & Green, 2008; Howe, 2008; Thomas & Smith, 2009). Although Paralympic sport has increasingly been drawn into the political spotlight in recent years and elite athletes with a disability are viewed as national representatives in the competition between nations, it can be noted that funding and support measures in Paralympic sports in many countries by no means match the level of support given to Olympic sports. This imbalance between disability and non-disability sport is linked not only to such factors as their historical

development2 but also to the special structural features of high- performance disability sport such as the classification system3.

1.1 Germany’s structural disadvantages as regards talent recruitment and development in high-performance disability sports

Germany has always entered the Paralympic Games with one of the largest teams and belongs to the top ten nations appearing in the medals tables in both the winter and summer games. While the German National Paralympic Committee (DBS/NPC Germany) was able to maintain

its dominating position in winter sports (cf. the rankings in the medal tables: Nagano 1998: 2nd

place; Salt Lake City 2002: 1st place; Turin 2006: 2nd place; Vancouver 2010: 1st

1 This goes hand in hand with the growing attention devoted to competitive disability sport by the media. Here, however,

Thomas and Smith (2009, pp. 135ff.) point out that although the media’s coverage of athletes with a disability has increased in recent years, their reports are still frequently marked by stereotypical views of people with disabilities. Furthermore, their reporting is one-sided inasmuch as athletes with serious multiple disabilities do not normally appear.

2 On the historical development of competitive disability sport see, for example, DePauw & Gavron (2005, pp. 37ff.), Howe (2008; pp. 15ff.) and Tiemann (2006, pp. 109ff.).

3 The classification system takes into consideration the restrictions of individual athletes in a particular sport due to their personal disability. For information on the classification system see Buckley (2008), Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft (2008). Various authors regard the classification system as the key structural feature of disability sports (cf. Howe & Jones, 2006; Sherrill, 1999; Steadward, 1996; Vanlandewijck & Chappel, 1996).

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Introduction and Issues

place), it has failed to keep up with the world’s best in the summer games since the 2000 Games in Sydney (Seoul 1988: 2nd place; Barcelona 1992: 2nd place; Atlanta 1996: 3rd place;

Sydney 2000: 10th place; Athens 2004: 8th place; Peking 2008: 11th place; London 2012: 8th

place). There are many different reasons for this development. In the course of a pilot project that we carried out at the Free University of Berlin in 2007 entitled “Talent Identification and

Development in Elite Sport with Athletes with a Disability. A Cross-national Comparison”4

experts pointed out that, compared with other countries, it was difficult in Germany to

recruit5 new talent6 for top-level competitive sport among people with disabilities. The structural disadvantages in Germany when compared with the various support models of other countries are connected, for example, with the lack of any nation-wide cooperation between disability and non-disability sport as well as a lack of professionalism in high- performance disability sports due to inadequate financial and human resources. Measures taken in Germany, which frequently owe their existence to the initiatives of committed individuals, appear to be in stark contrast to systematic, country-wide strategies of talent recruitment and development abroad, which are in the hands of government-sponsored organisations (Radtke & Doll-Tepper, 2007).

1.2 Advantages of foreign systems

The data gathered in the above-mentioned pilot project reveals that cooperation between disability and non-disability sport is much closer in countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), Australia and Canada, leading to, among other things, the forming of joint umbrella organisations for the two types of sport. In British Swimming, the governing body for swimming and water sports in Britain, for example, no difference whatsoever is made between athletes with or without a disability as far as funding, prize money or sport-related supervision

are concerned.7 Furthermore, following the principle of equal opportunity, the

4 The aim of the pilot project (funding code: IIA1-070402/07) funded by the Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft (BISp – the

Federal Institute of Sports Science) was to establish the current state of knowledge with regard to talent scouting and support among young people taking part in competitive disability sports in Germany’s 17 regional federations. In addition, data was gathered in connection with the actual state of talent scouting and support in other countries.

5 Recruiting talent has been made even more difficult – not only in Germany – by the fact that many classic forms of disability (amputation, blindness, etc.) are on the decline due to medical progress in industrial nations. On the other hand, the number of people with severe physical and multiple disabilities, many of whom do not have the potential to take part in competitive sport, is increasing. The consequence of this development is that for the classic Paralympic Sport nations it is becoming increasingly difficult to compete on the same terms with certain (often centrally governed) countries like China (with over 17 million people who suffer from physical disabilities or visual impairments), Russia and Ukraine.

6 It must be pointed out here that in disability sport – in contrast to able-bodied sport – the term “new talent” includes not only children and adolescents but also adults who after a traumatic event or following the onset of a degenerative illness find their way into high-performance sport.

7 Especially in Britain and Spain disability sports enjoy a wholly different dimension of financial support compared with Germany. In Britain the funding of disability sport is based on national lottery money and in Spain on resources made available by ONCE, the organisation for the blind.

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Introduction and Issues

programmes for seeking and developing new talent are always oriented to both types of sport. Whereas in Australia, Canada and the UK it is quite usual for national federation squad athletes both with and without disabilities to train together and for coaches working in the area of able-bodied sports to readily integrate athletes with a disability into their training groups, in Germany there are reservations about this kind of integration on the part of some officials and trainers. According to experts, a fundamental change in mindset is needed in Germany before any structural reform can be implemented. The findings of the pilot project suggest that the decisive difference between countries is to be found in the varying strategies of support for disability sport drawn up by governments and/or national sports federations.

In the following we will first of all give an overview of the current state of knowledge in the area of (international comparisons of) the overall funding of elite sport (i.e. not relating to disability sport alone), taking special account of talent recruiting and development, before going into the state of research in the area of high-performance disability sport.

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2 Overview of the state of research

2.1 International comparison of elite sport funding, taking special account of measures to recruit and develop new talent

In the context of international comparative research various authors have examined the question of the degree of influence which is necessary to determine the success of a nation in international top-level competitive sport (cf. (among others) Figott, Collins, Martindale & Sowerby, 2002; De Bosscher, Bingham, Shibli, Van Bottenburg & De Knop, 2008; Digel, Burk & Fahrner, 2006; Fisher & Borms, 1990; Houlihan & Green, 2008; Oakley & Green, 2001; UK Sport, 2006). De Bosscher et al. (2008) have identified pertinent factors at the macro level (i.e. the socio-cultural context of a society; the country’s economy, its political system, its population, its geographic and climatic conditions), the meso level (the general framework of sports structures) and the micro level (the personal circumstances of individual athletes and

their immediate surroundings).8 While factors operating at the macro level are social facts (cf. Green, 2007),9 sports policy actors are given far more opportunity to influence developments at the meso level (Oakley & Green, 2001). According to Digel et al. (2006, p. 231), seeking and identifying new talent are of “utmost significance for top-level competitive sport in all sports nations the world over” since this is the decisive factor in guaranteeing the survival of a national top-level competitive sport system. Consequently, seeking, selecting and developing new talent represent a key component in furthering elite sport (cf. (among others) Emrich & Pitsch, 2008; Emrich, Güllich & Pitsch, 2005; Fessler, 2002; Fessler, Frommknecht, Kaiser, Renna, Schorer & Binder, 2002; Fuchsloher & Romann, 2009; Knoll, 2001; Rütten, Ziemainz & Röger, 2005; Scheid, Eppinger & Adolph, 2007). For able-bodied sport it is an accepted fact that the early and sustained support of young talented athletes influences international competitiveness in top-level sport in the long term (Figott & Collins, 2004). According to Oakley and Green (2001, p. 92) Australia provides the world’s most systematic procedures for

seeking new talent with its central Talent Search Programme (TSP).10 Talent identification in Germany, on the other hand, is considered to be relatively unsystematic in comparison with other countries (Digel et al., 2006, p. 238; Petry, Steinbach & Burk, 2008, pp. 131 ff.). Measures aimed at seeking and developing new talent in various countries address different

8 De Bosscher et al. (2008, pp. 21ff.) identify nine factors altogether which are decisive for the success of an elite sports

system: 1. financial support; 2. the organisation and structure of sports policy; 3. participation in sport; 4. talent search and support; 5. career advice/career development services, also when sporting careers have ended; 6. training facilities; 7. number of coaches/basic and continuing coach training; 8. international competitions; 9. scientific and technical sports research and accompanying knowledge transfer.

9 Nations’ sporting success at the Olympic Games is influenced by social, economic and demographic variables (cf. Bernard & Busse, 2004; Seppänen, 1999; Lamprecht & Stamm, 2001).

10 This assertion must be seen in connection with the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, when considerable effort was put into every kind of support for elite sport (a similar development was noticeable in China in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics).

9

State of research

target groups (Digel et al., ibid., pp. 239ff.). While talent seeking in countries such as Australia, France, Germany, Italy and the UK takes place at the sports club level, such measures are unknown in countries like China, Russia and the USA. Only in a few countries are the key talent seeking programmes sport-wide, i.e. not specific to one sport (Australia, China and Russia) and nation-wide (Australia, China, France, Italy, the USA). In Germany the sports federations of the federal states are responsible for seeking new talent, and in the UK talent seeking activities are focused on the regions, which with their High-Performance Centres can boast a sports infrastructure oriented to high-performance sport. In the USA a prominent role in talent scouting is played by high schools and their sporting competitions. A similar strategy can be observed in Australia, China and Russia, while in France, Germany, Italy and the UK only limited use is made of schools as locations for talent scouting. In China and Russia the children’s sports schools that exist are also included in the talent identification process.

Besides recruiting talent, an essential component of any system of furthering elite sport – the aim of which is success in competition with other countries – is developing talent. Digel, Fahrner & Sloboda (2005, pp. 33ff.) have identified the following factors of athlete support that are important for success in international competitions: national squad structures; funding; training/service measures in special training/performance centres; and measures to integrate school, vocational training and sports training. Numerous authors have inquired into the framework within which physical education takes place at German schools and its suitability for a system of talent development oriented to high-performance sport (see, for example, Brettschneider & Heim, 2001; Hug, 2001; Richartz & Brettschneider, 1996; Teubert, Borggrefe, Cachay & Thiel, 2006), although in this connection the perspective of cross-cultural comparisons has so far rarely been taken into consideration (Radtke & Coalter, 2007). And in any analysis of the degree of influence necessary for success in the field of international top- level sport it must be borne in mind that, besides the factors described at the macro and meso levels, athletes’ individual pathways at the micro level are also of great relevance (see, for example, Conzelmann & Nagel, 2003).

2.2 The current controversy between sports scientists and sports practitioners over the structure of talent development in German high-performance sport

In the question of furthering talent in the German top-level competitive sport system (in able- bodied sport) a difference of opinion is currently to be observed between sports scientists and sports practitioners (cf. Killing, Adams & Ribbecke, 2009). At the core of the dispute is the significance of systematic work with new talented athletes for later top performance and success. From the technical point of view of coaching the argument is supported that there is little reliability in forecasting the later performance of young athletes (see, for example, Hohmann, Wick & Carl, 2002; Hohmann, 2009). In addition, social scientists have drawn the conclusion from their research that, for one thing, as the performance level in a sport increases, so does the proportion of athletes who started their career in a different sport (Emrich & Güllich, 2005) and that, for another, pupils who attend an elite sport school have no

State of research

10

advantage over other pupils with regard to performance (Emrich, Pitsch, Güllich, Klein, Fröhlich, Flatau, Sandig & Anthes, 2008). Officials working in everyday sports practice, on the other hand, are convinced of both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the existing institutions responsible for the early support of new talent in the German sports system.11

2.3 The state of research on high-performance disability sport

While in the field of able-bodied sport numerous studies are available both on the general organisational structure of high-performance sport as well as on structural questions of talent development, the state of research on current support structures in disability sport has long been considered in need of development and enlargement in both national and international contexts (cf. Brittain, 2008, pp. 165ff.; Radtke & Doll-Tepper, 2007). For a long time studies dealing with the issue of ‘physical disability and sport’ came mainly from the Anglo-American world and discussed the socialisation of people with disabilities into sport along with the barriers connected with this, as well as the different patterns of motivation for their taking up

sport.12 Comparatively few studies dealt with the careers of athletes with a disability in high- performance sport (cf. Scheid, Rank & Kuckuck, 2003; Tiemann, 2006; Wheeler, Malone, Van Vlack, Nelson & Steadward, 1996; Wheeler, Steadward, Legg, Hutzler, Campbell & Johnson, 1999; Williams, Schüle, Kolkka & Hubach, 2001).

It must be added, though, that for several years a change of trend has fortunately been taking place in the German-speaking world, and a number of publications have appeared which are either concerned primarily with psychological aspects of high-performance disability sport (see, for example, Wegner, 2001/2008; Höner, Kämpfe & Willimczik, 2009; Schliermann, 2011/2012) or which examine the structural framework and general conditions of high- performance disability sport (see, for example, Kemper, 2003; Kemper & Teipel, 2007; Kemper & Teipel, 2008; Scheid, Kuckuck & Simen, 2000; Scheid & Wegner, 2004; Wegner, Pochstein & Rotermund, 2008). In order to improve the structures of German high- performance disability sport, the Federal Institute of Sports Science (Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft - BISp) awarded two research grants for the years 2009 to 2013 in this field with the aim of optimising current procedures of identifying and developing talent. In their analysis of the system of talent support from the perspectives of officials, coaches and athletes Wegner, Brückner und Pochstein (2011) focused their research on German disability sport. The study presented here adopts a perspective of cross-cultural comparison.

11 Killing, Adams und Ribbecke (2009) point out that in this discussion a distinction must be made between types of sport in

which an early focus and sport-specific training appear to be useful and those in which they do not. Here, the key criteria are, for example, the early age of top-level performance, as well as dependence on materials and location. To settle the dispute, the authors (ibid., p. 44) propose an “open sports system” which manifests general sports training in childhood and early adolescence without any early specialisation, as well as scouting in a biennial rhythm in all sports.

12 For an overview of the available research literature in the Anglo-American world, see DePauw & Gavron (2005, p. 164ff.).

State of research

11

One of the few cross-cultural comparative studies to be published so far in the field of disability sport is that of Williams, Schüle, Kolkka und Hubach (2001). In their analysis of the socialisation of people with disabilities into wheelchair basketball in the UK and Germany the authors stress that the different historical and structural features of support measures for disability sport in both countries lead to differing patterns of athletes’ sporting biographies.

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3 The special features of high-performance disability sport in the context of talent identification and development

When dealing with the issue of ‘talent identification and development in high-performance sport for athletes with a disability’ it is essential to point out that high-performance disability sport differs fundamentally from able-bodied sport in many respects as far as seeking and furthering new talent is concerned (cf. in the following Radtke & Doll-Tepper, 2007) and that, as a consequence, insights into this issue gained by academic research in the area of able- bodied sport can be applied to disability sport only to a limited extent.

First of all, the cohort of high-performance athletes in disability sport is made up of a substantially smaller number of persons than is the case in non-disability sport. Depending on the physical attributes of individual athletes, i.e. type and severity of the particular disability, their age and their personal inclinations, only a very small percentage of the population comes into consideration for high-performance disability sport. In the age group of 15 to 45 (i.e. the relevant age group for individuals with a disability taking part in competitive sport)

German statistics reveal a mere 110,000 persons with a relevant disability.13 Thus, it is clear that elite disability sport in Germany has a very limited pool of potential candidates to choose from. Some 5,000 athletes take part in sports competitions held under the aegis of the German Disability Sport Federation (DBS/NPC), which culminate in the German championships. Around 200 of these athletes succeed in obtaining a place in one of the federation’s squads; accordingly, the main aspects of training are kept fairly general. With very few exceptions, there is no great concentration of athletes either in one sport or in one

specific disability group.14

Furthermore, particular consideration must be given to the age structure of elite athletes with disabilities inasmuch as these are older – in terms of the statistical mean – than able-bodied athletes. There are several reasons for this: many athletes, for example, only find their way into disability sport after a traumatic event or only after the onset of a degenerative disease. Both these situations first of all represent a dramatic turning point in the lives of those concerned. Managing to cope with everyday life, concentrating on school and/or vocational

13 According to German social law (SGB IX, §2 Para. 2) people with severe disabilities are those assessed with a degree of

disability of at least 50%. In most cases (89%) disabilities are caused by a disease. Most frequently people belonging to this group suffer from impairment to the function of inner organs/ organ systems, followed by the restricted function of limbs, the spine or the torso. Cerebral disorders are the cause of disablement in under 10% of cases. Around 5% of people with a disability are visually impaired or blind. At present there are approximately 6.8 million people with severe disabilities in Germany. More than half of them (53.3%) are 65 years old and older, and slightly over a fifth of them (21.1%) belong to the 55-64 age bracket. By contrast, the proportion of those under the age of 18 is very small (2.4%) (see: www.bpb.de/files/9G2CX4.pdf - retrieved 20. 07. 2009).

14 In this context disability sport must not be understood as sport in the proper sense, but rather as a collective term for numerous types of sport and disabilities. For this reason there are limits to the possibility of forming homogeneous training groups.

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Special features of high performance disability sport

training, or later on their career, are the first priorities. Not until they are ready to think about facing new challenges does sport increasingly begin to come (back) into focus. Thus, as a general rule, the term “new talent” in disability sport is taken to cover not only adolescents

but also adults who after an illness or an accident find their way (back) to sport.15 In connection with the specific age structure in high-performance disability sport one must also take the (not infrequent) restricted mobility of athletes with a disability into consideration. Here, it is not so much the physical lack of mobility in the home or the immediate environment on account of the disability but more the personal ties with their surroundings and their families that make it difficult for them to move or travel to other places. Not least because of their higher age, many elite athletes have founded families and have become breadwinners. As a result, the personal circumstances of individual athletes must always be taken into consideration when it comes to arranging the training setting.

Young talents often do not reach their best performance age until about eight years after development has started. On the other hand, athletes with a disability tend to stay longer in top-level competitive sport than is the case with able-bodied athletes (so that participation in three Paralympic Games is quite realistic). Not infrequently, however, the absence of any visible short-term success of the support given is seen as an obstacle by potential sponsors.

Experts agree that in disability sport the aim should be, in principle, for specialisation in one particular sport to start later. Ideally, children and adolescents with disabilities acquired in early childhood should at first be given the opportunity of gathering experience of their bodies by trying out as many different physical activities and kinds of sport as possible. Experts also recommend that adults with a disability acquired at a more recent age should likewise take part in a basic sports programme consisting of a wide variety of activities before starting to specialise. In this way they learn how to manage the changes in the way they experience their bodies (Radtke & Doll-Tepper, 2007).

The cooperation between schools and sports clubs, considered so important for talent development in able-bodied sport and much discussed in the literature (see, for example, Fessler, Scheid, Trosien, Simen & Brückel, 1999), has so far failed to bear fruit in the youth section of disability sport. There are various reasons for this: at both national and international levels, for example, the cooperation of sports clubs or federations with schools is made all the more complicated by data protection issues since it is difficult for those responsible to obtain information from education authorities about the schooling of pupils

with a disability at regular ‘mainstream’ schools.16 The advantage of German special needs schools is that they cater for many different types of disability and, as a consequence, talent

15 It is not uncommon to meet athletes in adult groups who, before acquiring their disability, took part in competitive

sports in the sphere of able-bodied sport.

16 The majority of children with cerebral palsy attend regular schools rather than special needs schools. In the interviews conducted as part of our pilot project the view was expressed that parents usually had a rather reserved attitude towards disability sports clubs since they generally preferred their children’s integration in mainstream sports clubs.

14

Special features of high performance disability sport

identification activities could be carried out in a more target-oriented fashion. However, experts agree that pupils with the potential to take part in competitive sports are rarely to be found in such schools; in fact, their intake is for the most part made up of pupils with severe multiple disabilities. The aim of the DBS is to integrate young (adolescent) federation squad athletes with disabilities into existing elite sports schools, and so far such integration has been successful in individual cases (for example in elite sports schools in Leipzig, Berlin, Leverkusen and Kaiserslautern). At present admission to such schools is decided upon individually according to the adolescent’s particular needs – meaning that so far the admission of young people in wheelchairs to elite sports schools has been turned down since often these schools have not yet been re-designed to accommodate pupils with disabilities.

15

4 Defining the aim and the issues underlying the study

The aim of the research project is to analyse in a cross-cultural comparison the structural conditions of the systems set up to identify and develop new talent in athletics, swimming, Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing and wheelchair basketball in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA. In the sense of a quality management approach the project takes the form of an international comparative analysis of structures, processes and results in the identification and development of talent in disability sport, taking selected sports as examples. The findings are to be used to draw up strategies for an effective and efficient organisation of the German system in future. The following issues underlie the study:

1. What forms do the structures of the high-performance disability sport systems take in the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA, giving special consideration to the structures of talent identification and development?

2. Which features of quality determine the structures of talent identification and development for high-performance disability sport in the individual countries?

3. What makes the features of quality in the individual countries distinct?

4. Which optimisation strategies can be derived from this international comparison for the German system?

16

5 The selection of countries

With regard to the selection of countries to be considered in the study, the BISp’s invitation to bid stipulated that “successful Paralympic nations (places 1-10 in the medal tables) in the Olympic four-year cycles from 2000/2002 to 2008/2010” were to be taken into account.

This stipulation led to the following result for summer and winter sports (in total there are eleven countries which always gained a place among the top ten nations in the relevant Paralympic Games):

Summer sport: China (Sydney 2000: 6th place / Athens 2004: 1st place / Peking 2008: 1st place), UK (2nd /2nd /2nd), USA (5th /4th /3rd), Canada (3rd /3rd /7th), Australia (1st /5th /5th), Spain (4th /7th /10th).

Winter sport: Russia (Salt Lake City 2002: 5th place /Turin 2006: 1st place), Germany (1st /2nd), USA (2nd /5th), Canada (6th /6th), Austria (4th /7th).

As a result of the experience we had gathered during the pilot project we came to the conclusion that including countries such as China and Russia in an international comparative study was to be viewed as problematic since here obtaining information could be difficult, if not impossible. During our pilot project already, it emerged that in both these countries there were signs of a (government-decreed) “policy of secrecy”, for example the refusal of officials to give interviews. And in respect of both quantitative and qualitative interviewing and questioning techniques, it was not to be expected that the athletes and trainers would answer in a way that was free of any prompting from the political sphere. Further obstacles were language difficulties and thus also in establishing contacts. Digel, Burk and Fahrner (2006, pp. 89ff.) referred to similar difficulties while conducting their international comparative study and mentioned in this connection problems of access, communication, control and sanctions, for example. By contrast, establishing contacts in our pilot project with the relevant people in countries like the UK, Canada and the USA turned out to be ideal. For the future research project the selection of countries is essentially based on the following three aspects:

on their ranking in the medal tables of all Paralympic Games between 2000/2002 and 2008/2010 (among the first ten nations);

on the experience we gained during the pilot project (see below); and

on the feasibility of establishing contacts and the practicability of conducting oral interviews and questionnaire surveys (taking account of higher costs of interviews and questionnaires in languages not spoken by the members of the working group).

On grounds of time and cost it was thought advisable to limit the number of nations selected. For these reasons we proposed that three countries be included in the research project and

17

Selection of countries

recommended the choice of the UK, Canada and the USA.17 Besides our long-standing contact with senior officials both in the umbrella organisations of sport as well as in field of disability sport in the three countries, we had already established personal contact in the expert interviews we carried out as part of the pilot project (2007) with individuals working in the area of of talent identification and development in the countries selected. We were thus able to draw upon these contacts during our work on the present research project.

17 It may be criticised here that the three nations selected belong exclusively to the Anglo-Saxon world. Including an

Asiatic country, for example, would doubtless have broadened the perspective of international disability sport, but on account of the limited resources available for this project, this was impossible. Since the invitation to bid for the research project also stipulated the inclusion of countries which were to be found among the top ten nations in the Olympic four-year cycles since the year 2000 and, in addition, that both summer and winter sports were to be taken into account in the analysis, the number of eligible countries was limited.

18

6 The challenges of international comparative research

For some time now a trend towards international comparative research has been observable in the field of social sciences – although in the sports science institutions of the German- speaking world the pace of this trend has so far been rather cautious. Carrying out cross- cultural comparative research is connected with challenges at various levels. Gebauer, Braun, Suaud and Faure (1999, p. 37), for example, point out that seeking comparable institutions in other countries may lead to an “unreflected exchange” without any account being taken of the fact that “in cross-cultural comparisons [there is] no culture-independent, culture- overarching standard of comparison”. In contrast to this, we have set ourselves the task in the present study of shedding light on both institutions and prevailing practices at the various institutional levels in the respective cultural contexts.

In examining a country’s programme of talent identification and development in Paralympic sport it is essential to take into consideration culture-dependent variables such as the structures of the national sport system. However, national sport systems in no way exist in isolation; they operate, rather, under the influence of the political, social, economic and – last but not least – geographical environment of a given country. Examples of such influences are given in the following.

Country-specific geographic conditions

The countries included in the study, the USA, Canada and the UK, exhibit very different basic features with regard to both surface area and population. The size of the population, in turn, has an effect on the number of people with disabilities in a country. The UK, for example, has

a comparatively small surface area (243,610km2) and a population of 61.8 million, 10.4 million of whom are diagnosed as having a disability. Canada, the second largest country in the world, has an area of 9,984,670km² but has only roughly 34 million inhabitants, of whom 4.4 million

appear in the statistics as having a disability. With an area of 9,629,090km2 the USA is only slightly smaller than Canada, although its population (300 million) is many times greater than that of its neighbour to the north. The number of inhabitants with a disability is also much higher than that of Canada – in fact nine times higher (36.2 million). The fact that the proportion of people with disabilities (as listed in the statistics of each country) as a percentage of the population as a whole differs considerably (see Table 1) is an indication that (among other things) the criteria for registering disabilities are culture-dependent. Other factors, such as the presence of war veterans in a particular country, also play a role. Several of our interview partners, for example, expressed the view that the success of the USA in Paralympic sport was above all due to the high number of war wounded in the country. With regard to the numbers of people with disabilities18 in the three countries (irrespective of their

18 It must be pointed out here that although the total number of people with disabilities in the statistics does not say

anything about the number of people in the relevant age group of recruitment for sport or the distribution of

19

Challenges of international comparative research

percentage of the population as a whole), it can be concluded that the size of the pool of potential Paralympics participants that the USA, Canada and the UK are able to draw upon differs greatly – even if no conclusions can be drawn about the number of persons with a disability in the relevant age group and the classification of their disablement. The relevance of the size of a country in the search for and development of new talent should also not be underestimated since a very large surface area – as in the cases of the USA and Canada – means considerably greater transport costs, for example for those taking part in training camps and competitions. The cost of a flight from the Canadian east coast to the west coast, for instance, is far greater than the cost of a flight to Europe, as one Canadian national coach reported.

To better illustrate the figures given in the text on the sizes of surface area and population as well as the numbers of people with disabilities in the three countries, these are shown again in Table 1.

Table 1 Figures of surface area, population and number of persons with a disability in the

three countries discussed

Area

(in

km2)

Populatio

n (in

millions)

Numbers / percentages

of people with

disabilities UK 243,610 61.79 4.42m / ca. 6%

Canada 9,984,670 34.02 10.41m / ca. 29%19

USA 9,629,090 299.85 36.17m / ca. 12%

Sources of revenue and the volume of available financial resources

In the three countries included in the study there are differences both with regard to the availability of various sources of revenue and with regard to the volume of the financial resources earmarked for (high-performance) disability sport. This applies both to government grants and to sponsoring on the part of private financial backers. Furthermore, in all three countries there are widely differing policies with regard to prize money.

particular types of disability, a high total number does imply proportionally a higher share of the subgroup relevant for our context.

19 Widely differing figures exist with regard to the proportion of people with disabilities in the population as a whole. Canadian Sport for Life‘s homepage, for example gives a percentage of between ten and fourteen per cent. (See: http://www.canadiansportforlife.ca/default.aspx?PageID=1056&LangID=en – retrieved 11.02.2011).

Challenges of international comparative research

20

Ethical standards in dealing with the issue of disability in society as a whole

In the three countries the issue of disability meets with quite different ethical standards. While in the UK, for example, a (media) campaign entitled “Talent 2012: Paralympic Potential” was initiated by UK Sport, such kinds of initiative would not be permitted in Canada according to experts.

Education policy and the degree of integration/inclusion of pupils with a disability

The role played by the degree of integration/inclusion of pupils with a disability in the issue of talent recruitment and development in Paralympic sport must not be underestimated since the existence of special schools can facilitate the search for new talent. By contrast, access to pupils with disabilities who attend regular schools is frequently denied on account of the data protection laws in force in each country.

21

7 Theoretical frame of reference

With regard to theory, this study borrows from the quality management model which Rütten, Ziemainz and Röger (2005) developed for the search, selection and development of talent (in

able-bodied sport).20 Following the phase model of the US-American quality researcher, Avedis Donabedian (1966, 1980, 1992), quality is divided into three dimensions: structure, process

and outcome.21 These dimensions of quality based on Donabedian’s model are the tools of choice in the operationalisation of quality in social and health care. Here, quality signifies the degree to which a set of quality features fulfil certain requirements. In this sense quality is the “degree of fulfilment” of the attributes and features of a product or service, i.e. the extent to which the given requirements are fulfilled. In their model Rütten, Ziemainz and Röger (2005) distinguish between four determinants with regard to the category of structure: aims,

resources, commitments and possibilities.22 Drawing on Rütten et al. (2005), quality management indicators are exemplified in the following for the field of talent identification and development in high-performance disability sport:

Structural quality

specification of aims for recruiting and developing talent in high-performance disability sport on the part of the organisations involved

human, financial and infrastructural resources (including staff qualifications) for recruiting and developing talent in high-performance disability sport

cooperation within the sport system (between schools and sports clubs, between organisations of disability and non-disability sport)

external capacities for the talent support system on the part of politics, the economy, science and the media

20 After testing the explanatory power of their quality management model by means of regression analyses, Rütten et al.

(2005) were able confirm the validity of their model. Following this model can be recommended, not least because in this way a direct comparison can be made of the talent support systems in operation in both able-bodied and disability sport.

21 Donabedian (1980) applied the quality model in the first place to health services. Structural quality comprises the abilities of institutions and the employees necessary for constructing the product (e.g. technical equipment, physical/ organisational working conditions, as well as opportunities of access and use by clients). Process quality refers to the total sum of actions performed in putting the product together. Process quality is the key instrument of quality management. Outcome quality applies to the difference between the initial state and the end state. This category forms the most important basis for evaluating the services performed. It can be measured by means of objective changes (e.g. improvement in the state of health, complication rates or increase in patient rates) as well as by means of subjective criteria (e.g. patient satisfaction).

22 Here the authors orient their approach to a model of action theory proposed by the Finnish philosopher, Georg Henrik von Wright (1976), which represents an explanatory approach to individual human action.

22

Theoretical frame of reference

Process quality

planning and implementing strategies of talent recruitment and development (making use of scientific findings, carrying out talent identification activities, conducting talent training courses / coaching procedures)

supervising the measures taken (documentation and evaluation)

Outcome quality

achieving aims / outcome of the measures taken (number of athletes selected, drop-out rate)

long-term effects of the measures taken (number of medals at Paralympic Games)

23

8 Methodological procedures

Information on the quality features of talent recruitment and development in high- performance disability sport was generated in two sub-studies conducted in the countries selected using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In a first exploratory research phase the focus was on the generation of hypotheses by means of qualitative interviews while the aim of the second phase of research was to test the hypotheses by means of a standardised questionnaire.

Fig. 1 Research phases

8.1 Research phase 1: document analysis and exploratory interview study

In order to be able to formulate any conclusions about talent recruitment and development in the countries selected, it is essential first of all to examine the structures of their (disability) sport systems and the support structures embedded in them. The findings of our pilot project (2007) had already made abundantly clear that at present there are huge differences in the structures of individual national sport systems all over the world. At the organisational level, for example, it is noticeable that the extent of cooperation between disability and non-disability sport varies considerably from country to country. Knowledge of the country-specific structure of the disability sport system was indispensable, not least on account of the planned qualitative study, in order to ensure an appropriate choice of interview partners, and thus a basis for comparing the statements made in the interviews.

An initial internet search for information about the structures of the disability sport systems in the three countries added to our knowledge only slightly since few publicly accessible sources (whether in electronic form or as printed documents) are available. Nor do most of the websites of the relevant sports organisations offer much pertinent information. This lack of available data was meant to be made up for by conducting expert

Exploratory phase: document analysis

Research phase 1: qualitative interview study (generating hypotheses)

Research phase 2: quantitative survey (testing hypotheses)

Evaluation and transfer phase

24

Methodological procedures

interviews,23 the interview partners in the first place being generated from the pool of contacts known to us personally from the pilot project (2007). We decided to include questions on the structure of the sport system (relating both to the respective country and, where appropriate, to the respective sport) in the guidelines for the questioning of the partners in the subsequent interview study.

Selection of sports

As stipulated by the Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft (BISp), which commissioned the project, we took five sports into account in our study:

athletics

swimming

Alpine skiing

Nordic skiing

wheelchair basketball

Selection of our interview partners

Our interview partners belonged to three groups of individuals:

1. Officials with expert knowledge of talent identification and development in high- performance disability sport who belonged to the following organisations:

national umbrella organisations of sport

national Paralympic committees

national organisations of the five selected sports

military sports organisations24 of (Paralympic) sports for war veterans

miscellaneous25

o two interview partners, one of whom who worked at the school level and one for the Disability Sport Council (UK). They were both recommended to us as interview partners because of their particular expertise

o two representatives of the US National Disability Sports Organisations

2. national coaches in the five sports

3. national squad athletes in the five sports26

23 We followed the approach to conducting expert interviews proposed by Gläser and Laudel (2006).

24 In the original research design (i.e. before the contents of the study had been finalised) it was not planned to take military sports organisations into consideration. After the role of the military in connection with talent recruitment in Paralympic sport was referred to several times in the first interviews, we decided to extend our questioning of experts to include this field.

25 The interviews in the category “miscellaneous” were of a pre-test nature.

25

Methodological procedures

In the original conception of the project our aim was, at the levels of both officials and coaches, to interview one person responsible from each organisation/sport. Furthermore, we had planned, at the athlete level, to differentiate between different forms of

disablement in accordance with international sports federation structures.27 Since, however, in the course of the project the recruitment of national squad athletes for our interviews turned out to be a greater challenge than we had supposed, we abandoned our original plan to take into account three athletes from each country and sport, each of whom had a different form of disablement. Instead, we concentrated on the maximum aim of getting three national team members from each country and sport (irrespective of their disability) to take part in our interview study. The total sample of the interview study thus comprised 64 persons.

Table 2 shows the number of interviews conducted at the levels of both officials and coaches, whose affiliation to a certain organisation is specified.

26 In two cases these were former national team members who had ended their careers at the time of the interviews.

27 In athletics, swimming, Alpine skiing and Nordic skiing, we had planned to differentiate between athletes with three types of disability: amputees/wheelchair users (International Wheelchair & Amputee Sports Federation/ IWAS), the visually impaired/blind (International Blind Sports Federation/IBSA) and people with cerebral palsy (Cerebral Palsy International Sports & Recreation Association/CP-ISRA).

26

Methodological procedures

Table 2 Interview group 1: officials (N = 22)

Institution UK Canada USA Total

Sports

umbrella

organisati

on

N = n/a28

UK Sport

N = 1

Sport Canada

N = 1

United States

Olympic Committee

& US Paralympics

N = 2

National

Paralym

pic

Committ

ee

N = 1

British

Paralympic

Association

N = 229

Canadian

Paralympic

Committee

N = 3

Specific

sports

organisatio

ns (for the

five sports

selected)

N = 4

UK Athletics (2)

British Swimming (1)

GB Wheelchair

Basketball

Association (1)

Disability

Snowsport UK

(n/a)

Nordic skiing

(sport does not

exist)

N = 3

Athletics Canada (n/a)

Swimming

Canada (n/a)

Wheelchair

Basketball Canada

(1)

Alpine Canada Alpin (1)

Cross Country

Canada (1)

N = 3

US Paralympics: Track

& Field/Swimming (1)

National

Wheelchair

Basketball

Association (1)

US Paralympic: Alpine

& Nordic Skiing (1)

N = 10

Military

sports

organisation

s

Battle Back (1) Soldier On (1) Wounded Warrior (1) N = 3

Misc. Expert: school level

(1) Expert: council

level (1)

Disability sports USA (1)

Dwarf Athletic

Association of

America (1)

N = 4

Total N = 8 N = 7 N = 7 N = 22

28 Positions marked “n/a” (not available) mean that we were not able to come into contact with a suitable interview

partner.

29 In response to our request by email two officials offered to take part in the interview.

27

Methodological procedures

Table 3 shows the number of interviews conducted at the national coach level. In most cases we spoke with the coach responsible for each national team (head coach) and in exceptional cases the national coach responsible for “new talent” (national development coach).

Table 3 Interview group 2: national coaches (N = 14)

Sport UK CAN USA Total

Athletics Head Coach (1) Development

Coach

(1)

Head Coach (1) N = 3

Swimming Development

Coach

(1)

Head Coach (1) Head Coach (1) N = 3

Alpine skiing Head Coach (1) Head Coach (1) Head Coach (1) N = 3

Nordic skiing Sport does not exist Head Coach (1) Head Coach (1) N = 2

Wheelch

air

basketba

ll

Women’s

Head

Coach (1)

Men’s Head

Coach

(1)

Head Coach (1) N = 3

Total N = 4 N = 5 N = 5 N = 14

Table 4 shows the number of interviews conducted at the athlete level, along with the disability of each interview partner.

Table 4 Interview group 3: national squad athletes (N = 28)

UK CAN USA Total

Athletics N = 2

Cerebral palsy (1)

Amputation (1)

N = 2

Cerebral palsy

(1) Visual

impairment (1)

N = 3

Cerebral palsy (1)

Paraplegia (1)

Amputation (1)

N = 7

Swimming N = 3

Amputation (2)

Tetraplegia (1)

N = 2

Cerebral palsy (1)

Club foot (1)

N = 2

Dwarfism (1)

Visual impairment (1)

N = 7

Alpine skiing N = 3

Paraplegia (3)

N = 3

Paraplegia (1)

Amputation (1)

Cerebral palsy (1)

N = 3

Amputation (2)

Paraplegia (1)

N = 9

28

Methodological procedures

Nordic skiing Sport does

not

exist

N = 2

Amputation (2)

N = 1

Paraplegia (1)

N = 3

Wheelch

air

basketba

ll

N = 0 N = 0 N = 2

Paraplegia (1)

Amputation (1)

N = 2

Total N = 8 N = 9 N = 11 N = 28

Table 5 distinguishes in our sample of athletes between those with congenital disabilities and those with disabilities acquired later.

Table 5 Specified type of disability: congenital or acquired

Congenital disability Acquired disability

N = 10 N = 18

Our sample of athletes comprises altogether 16 men and 12 women. Table 6 distinguishes between gender and country of residence.

Table 6 Gender distribution in the sample of athletes according to country

Men (N) Women (N)

UK 6 2

Canada 5 4

USA 5 6

Total 16 12

The youngest athlete we spoke to (a man) was 20 years old (year of birth: 1990) at the time of the interview; the oldest – and no longer (athletically) active – member of the sample (a man) was 53 years old (year of birth: 1957). The oldest still athletically active athlete we spoke to (a woman) was 45 years old (year of birth: 1964) at the time of the interview. The average age of the sample (M) was thus 28.2 years.

Establishing contact with interview partners

As a first step we attempted to find the contact details of the members of the three interview groups (officials, national coaches, federation squad athletes / national team members) via the internet. This was fairly easy in the case of the officials (i.e. through their

29

Methodological procedures

federation’s website), but we were faced with much greater difficulty in the case of national coaches and even more so when it came to athletes. Contact details were usually only freely accessible in the case of officials; those of national coaches were only accessible in exceptional cases and those of athletes only very rarely. Exceptions were top athletes who had their own websites. Our enquiries into the email addresses of coaches and athletes in sport federation offices came to nothing – we were referred to data protection regulations.

Since we could assume that the members of our survey population had contact with each other (at least it could be supposed that officials and coaches as well as coaches and athletes were in regular contact) we used these contacts in order to assemble our study group successively. In the course of the research we gradually added to our interview sample using the principle of recommendation, or snowballing. (Classic areas of use of this survey method are, for example, gaining access to networks of friends and supporters: one interviews a small sample of individuals, asks about their best friends, interviews these friends and asks about their best friends, etc. (see, for example, Coleman, 1958). At the end of each session we asked our interview partners if they could help us to get into contact with further potential interview partners. In many cases they offered to contact coaches and/or athletes themselves in the first place and prepare them for our enquiry in order to increase their readiness to talk to us (or, alternatively, they offered to forward our enquiry with a suitable accompanying text). Thus, as far as the last two interview groups (of coaches and athletes) are concerned, we had to rely on the recommendation method outlined above.

It is sometimes pointed out in the literature that when the snowballing method is used, interview enquiries and recommendations circulate in those parts of the social structure in which the search originally began (see, for example, Gabler, 1992; Salentin, 1999). In our study the distortions which may result from this played only a subordinate role – at least with regard to the groups of officials and coaches – inasmuch as at these levels the composition of our interview partners involved a complete survey. At the level of officials we searched pertinent websites to identify suitable interview partners who were responsible for seeking and supporting talent in their particular organisation. At the coach level we wished to talk to national coaches; in exceptional cases we were referred to the national development coach in the relevant sport. When our enquiry was forwarded to athletes, every member of the respective national team was approached. On average two to three athletes made contact with us and expressed their interest in taking part in the study. Overall, it must be noted that the majority of the officials we approached revealed a willingness to support our research project and in this way help advance the development of the Paralympic movement, as several interviewees put it. All those who took part in the study lamented the fact that there was a complete lack of international networking with regard to strategies for seeking and supporting talent in disability sport. The circumstance that at first relatively few athletes responded to our request for an interview was attributable above all to their numerous and various commitments which were linked

Methodological procedures

30

not only to competitive sport but also to their attempts to reconcile the triad of sport, education/career and family. It was conspicuous that a large number of athletes only contacted us after receiving reminder emails, which we sent at intervals of roughly two weeks. While several athletes were obviously very pleased that their sport was being given so much attention as the subject of a scientific study and willingly agreed to being interviewed by telephone, other athletes we wrote to did not respond at all, even after repeated requests. Hence, in several sports either only a small number of athletes could be found who were willing to talk to us – or none at all (see Table 3).

Drawing up the interview guidelines

With regard to the practicability of subsequently evaluating and using the information, it appeared helpful if the same subjects were dealt with in all interviews. To ensure this, a guided interview procedure (in contrast to a purely narrative form of interview) was chosen in which certain predefined questions and issues were focused upon. The particular complexes and categories of questions were agreed upon and bracketed together in the interview guidelines in advance following the quality management indicators proposed by Rütten et al. (2005), outlined above, and drawing on the knowledge gained in the pilot project. This ensured from the start that all the interviews were “complete” in the sense that they covered all issues. The guidelines by no means implied a prescribed order in which the issues were to be dealt with; this would have controlled and restricted the conversation too much. On the contrary, although the conversation was to be oriented to the predefined complexes of issues, the interviewer was to allow the order of the topics discussed to follow the impulse of the particular interviewee. This form of interview is regarded as focused, or problem-centred, and it was very much our wish that the interview partner influenced the course of the conversation by discussing in depth aspects which appeared important to them. The interviewees were considered experts who possessed special knowledge of relevance to the research project. The interviews were divided into the four following thematic sections:

1. Socialisation into sports/getting involved in sport (before and after accident)

2. Socialisation into competitive sport/talent identification process

3. Socialisation into elite sport & talent development/elite sport support environment

4. Resources in society/disability, sport and society

Forms of communication and the analysis of interviews

In order to save time and cost, the conversations were held in the form of telephone interviews and recorded by a digital voice recorder. With interview partners who use Skype, it was agreed to hold a conversation via Skype free of charge. In these cases the

Methodological procedures

31

conversations were stored on the hard drive by means of the CallGraph Skype Recorder. With one exception30 all the conversations were held in English. The average length of the interviews was just over one-and-a-quarter hours (the longest lasting four hours). After each interview a so-called “postscript”, or “minutes”, was/were added in which the interviewer noted such things as her impressions of her own conduct during the interview as well as that of the interviewee and also of external influences on the course of the conversation. The recorded conversation was subsequently listened to and transcribed. The ratio of the length of the conversation to the processing time was on average 1:6 for the native speaker entrusted with this task.

This was followed by the evaluation of the interviews using the method of qualitative content analysis (based on Mayring, 2008). Analysis categories were first of all developed in group discussions in order to analyse and interpret the interviews by means of a system of categories. The categories were derived, firstly, from the research questions and thus from the interview guidelines; new categories then emerged from the data material. Bringing several people into the discussion on categories was crucial, not least in order to test the unambiguous character of the categories and perhaps modify the category definitions (process of intersubjective understanding based on Mayring). In this way the objectivity and reliability of the category scheme is ensured. The categories were defined in group

discussions and provided with anchor examples.31

Organisational structure of the sport system

Financial resources

Role of the military

Talent identification and development (TID) process

Elite sport support environment

Coaches

Disability & classification

Society

The drafts of the evaluation categories were put together into a hierarchical category scheme32 by means of which the transcribed material was encoded. The coding of the texts took place on the computer with the help of the MAXQDA 10 software program.33 The defined codes were allocated to individual text passages. Here, multiple categorisations

30 One national coach was a native German speaker who preferred to use his mother tongue.

31 The category system is to be found in Appendix B.

32 On hierarchical category schemes see Kelle (2000, pp. 494ff.).

33 MAXQDA, Software for qualitative data analysis, 1989 – 2010, VERBI Software. Consult. Sozialforschung GmbH, Berlin-Marburg-Amöneburg, Germany.

Methodological procedures

32

were possible, i.e. certain text passages could be matched with several categories, thus increasing the possibility of a differentiated evaluation.

8.2 Research phase 2: online survey

Gathering data

A questionnaire in English served as our tool for gathering data. It underwent preliminary testing and was subsequently optimised. Based on the quality management model developed by Rütten et al. (2005) the questionnaire was divided into various question complexes (see Table 8). Certain modifications were made, however, partly drawing on knowledge gained from the interview study. Furthermore, experience gathered from the data collection procedure used by the Kiel project team (Wegner et al., 2011) was made use of and further adjustments were made. The study was designed as an online survey and implemented using EFS Survey (Unipark) software.

Translating the questionnaire

Based on the questionnaires developed by Rütten et al. (2005) as well as by Wegner et al. (2011), the first version of our questionnaire was initially devised in German. In extensive discussions with a member of the project group whose native tongue was English this first version of the questionnaire was translated into English. In order to ensure that the questions (and their formulation) conformed to the cultural norms of each country (the USA, Canada and the UK), talks were then held with further experts drawn from the group of interview partners in the previous interview study. On the whole, this process of translating the questionnaire, in the course of which modifications had to be made repeatedly, proved to be rather time-consuming.

Expert rating and pre-testing

The process of designing as well as the technical planning and implementation of the online survey was continuously accompanied by experts of the Statistical Advice Unit (fu:stat) at Berlin’s Free University. After the completion and initial programming of the questionnaire, an online pre-test was carried out with test persons in order to make sure, firstly, that the questions would be correctly understood by all survey groups; secondly, that the order of the questions was plausible; and, finally, that the answer categories made sense. This online pre-test was subsequently evaluated in personal conversations with the test persons, which led to several modifications being made to it. The pre-test, moreover, provided us with information about the time taken by the different survey groups to answer the questions; this was finally set at 30 minutes and specified in the information that was sent to the survey groups prior to the actual survey.

Methodological procedures

33

The questionnaire’s structure

The questionnaire was divided into two parts (see Table 7):

Part I. Questions on Talent Identification (76 items); and Part II. Questions on Talent Development (65 items).

The personal details requested at the beginning and end of the questionnaire differed slightly according to the respective group (athletes, coaches and officials).

Table 7 Structure of the questionnaire (with the number of items per issue in brackets)

Personal details, e.g. nationality, sport, squad status, form of disability34

Part I: Talent Identification Part II: Talent Development

Goals of talent identification (10)

Resources: personnel, finances,

infrastructure (21)

General perception of disability sport in

society (5)

Support from parents and schools (5)

Support from sports science, government,

economy, able-bodied sport (6)

Military initiative Wounded

Warriors/Soldier on/Battle back (1)

Obligations of talent identification (14)

Classification process (4)

Results of talent identification (10)

Goals of talent development (9)

Resources: personnel,

finances, infrastructure (26)

Support from sports science, government,

economy, able-bodied sport (6)

Support from parents and schools (4)

Military initiative Wounded

Warriors/Soldier on/Battle back (1)

Obligations of talent development (13)

Results of talent development (6)

Part III: Personal status, e.g. educational background, career, age, children, sex

In Part I und Part II the participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement/disagreement with the item statements on a five-point Likert scale (1 = Applies fully; 2 = Applies; 3 = Neutral; 4 = Does not apply; 5 = Does not apply at all). It was also possible to answer: Not applicable (n/a). In order to exemplify the item statements relating to the issues dealt with in the questionnaire, Table 8 gives one example per issue complex in Part I: Talent Identification.

34 This set of questions differed according to group (officials, coaches, athletes).

Methodological procedures

34

Table 8 Examples of item statements in the individual issue complexes dealt with

Issue complex Example of item statement

Goals of talent identification Talent identification in our sport has goals that are known to all people who are responsible for it. Resources: personnel, finances,

infrastructure In our sport the coaches responsible for talent identification are qualified.

General perception of disability sport in society

The majority of the population thinks that people with a disability are not able to do sports because of their conditions.

Support from parents and schools Most parents are willing to allow their children to do high-performance sport.

Support from sports science, government, economy, able-bodied sport

In our sport, talent identification cooperates with sports science.

Military initiative Our national military initiative WOUNDED WARRIORS is helpful for talent identification in our sport.

Obligations of talent identification In our sport, talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB.

Classification process In our sport, there are clear national criteria for classifying athletes.

Results of talent identification In our sport, a sufficient number of athletes are identified.

Data gathering and response

Potential participants were approached by email for the first time on 1st July 2011 with an invitation to take part in the survey. A total of 291 personalised emails were sent, whose

recipients were hoped to have a multiplier effect. Up to the deadline of 15th August 2011 combined “thank you” / reminder emails were sent at intervals of two weeks. The response followed the familiar pattern of online surveys with an invitation per email. Most of the emails were retrieved in the first day or two after they were sent, but then the number of retrievals decreased within a few days before increasing again when the reminder emails

were sent two weeks later. Up to the last date for taking part in the survey on 15th August 2011 three reminder emails were sent. The number of completed questionnaires that were returned proved to be unexpectedly low (N = 87). Selection of the sample

The sample of this standardised survey was consistent in part with the interview partners of the first research phase, although it was somewhat broader in the sense that, to do

Methodological procedures

35

justice to the federalist structures of the sport systems in the three countries, account was taken (proportionally) of not only the national levels but also those of the Home Countries (UK), the provinces (Canada) and the federal states (USA).35

Description of the sample

Tables 9 to 12 give an overview of the nationality, function, sex and sport of the survey group.

Table 9 Characterisation of the sample according to nationality

Country Canada USA UK Total

N 32 31 24 87

Table 10 Characterisation of the sample according to function

Canada USA UK Total

Athletes 13 8 7 28

Coaches 14 20 12 46

Officials 5 3 5 13

Table 11 Characterisation of the sample according to sex

Athletes Coaches Officials Total

Male 16 26 11 53

Female 12 20 2 34

Total 28 46 13 87

35 In the analysis of the British system the four Home Countries – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland –

were included. The study of the Canadian and US-American systems took account of four provinces and four federal states respectively.

Methodological procedures

36

Table 12 Characterisation of the sample according to sport (not specified: N = 36)

Canada USA UK Total

Athletics 2 4 3 9

Swimming 2 2 5 9

Wheelch

air

basketba

ll

8 5 2 15

Alpine skiing 8 4 3 15

Nordic skiing 3 0 0 3

37

9 Results

9.1 Description of the overall structures of high-performance disability sport in the three countries taking into special consideration the structures of talent identification and development

Before beginning this section, we must point out that the findings we present are not to be gauged with the standards of an analysis but rather with those of a description. In this sense it was not possible to present an objective reality but merely the status quo, which was ascertained by means of documents available in the internet as well as the information provided by our interview partners – although, with regard to the statements made in the interviews, it was sometimes quite difficult to verify the truth or accuracy of their content. Interview partners, for example, not infrequently described the areas of responsibility of certain organisations or institutions in different – if not completely contrary – terms. In these cases internet sources were consulted in an attempt to shed light on the objectivity of such contradictory statements. Thus, it must be noted that on the part of the authors at least the effort was made to get as close as possible to objective reality in the descriptions of the different systems.

In the following – without any claim to completeness – those institutions are described (along with their areas of responsibility) which were named in the expert interviews as being the key organisations of the (high-performance) disability sport systems in the three countries. Furthermore, the descriptions of the structures take into consideration the categories of responsibilities and relationships. All data correspond to the state of our knowledge as of 2011. In view of the recommendations for action to be formulated as part of this research report, the following sections also include critical views on the structures of the high- performance disability sport system voiced by the experts we interviewed

9.1.1 Canada

The governmental organisation Sport Canada belongs to the Department of Canadian Heritage and is the country’s umbrella organisation for sport. Sport Canada is the main source of funding for both Olympic and Paralympic sport and controls three Sport Funding Programmes:36 while in the Athlete Assistance Programme (AAP) (performance-based) funding goes directly to squad athletes, payments out of the Sport Support Programme (SSP) and the Hosting Programme are allocated to sports organisations, among others the national sports federations, the national disability sports federations and the National Paralympic Committee.

36 See http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1267375779921/1268413494851 (retrieved 14.07.2011).

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The Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) is in charge of coordinating all work in connection with the Paralympic Games, cooperating at the national level with a total of 22 sports

organisations from the areas of both integrated37 sports federations (such as Alpine Canada, Cross Country Canada, Swimming Canada, Athletics Canada, Hockey Canada) as well as the four special organisations for disability sports (Canadian Wheelchair Sports Association, Canadian Blind Sports Association, Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association und Canadian Amputee Sports Association). One of the CPC’s key tasks is to strengthen communication and cooperation between sports federations and disability sports associations and, for example, to draw the attention of those responsible in the sports federations to sporting events organised by disability (sport) organisations. These events are seen by the sports experts as opportunities that could be used for talent scouting. As one CPC official reported:

After I make some contact, I step back, the CPC steps back, because we want them to do it on their own. We want to connect them, but eventually we don’t want to be needed to do that. And then next year they call them up and say, ‘Let’s do it again’. So it starts to become pretty natural. (CAO6)38

Several national coaches employed by elite sports federations reported in the interviews that good contacts had meanwhile been established with the disability sports associations but criticised the fact that there was still a lack of contact with other, higher-level institutions, namely national disability organisations:

There are sort of the disability sport groups and then there are the national disability groups. For example, Canadian Blind Sports captures a certain group of individuals, but we don’t have a connection with CNIB, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, which is really sort of the giant national governing body for blindness in the country. We don’t have a connection with that, so how many kids are missing out? How many potential athletes are we missing out of the CNIB group? […] How do we get into the CNIB and work with them and start developing partnerships with them, and be able to access their databases? (CAC1)

Unlike the National Paralympic Committees of other countries, the Canadian Paralympic Committee is not only in charge of the organisation of the Paralympic Games and top-level disability sport in the sense of a “game-based organisation”. On the contrary, the CPC defines itself as a “movement-based organisation” which also sees itself committed to grass-roots

37 It must be noted here that, with regard to their conditions, some sports federations are extremely progressive, so that

one might speak not only of integration but even of inclusion (the federations Swimming Canada, Alpine Canada and Hockey Canada may be named in this regard).

38 The Figreviations after each quote refer to the nationality (here: CAnada) and function (here: Official) of the person quoted, along with the number of the interview.

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support, not least in the context of talent identification and development. One interview partner explained this approach by pointing to negative experience in the past when the idea was pursued of concentrating exclusively on the support of top-level Paralympic sport:

Historically, we tried to be a game-based-only-high-performance sport organisation and it just about killed our organisation […] (In the past), we tried to do everything that the National Olympic Committee was doing. We even changed our name, so it sounded the same as theirs. We changed our logo. And it didn’t work. It was because we don’t have the same grass-roots system. So, you can be a game-based organisation and we are a movement-based organisation. We protect the Canadian Paralympic movement which includes high-performance and grass-roots work. (CAO6)

In summary, it can be concluded that, according to the statements made by experts, one great concern of the CPC in its work of supporting the Paralympic movement is, firstly, to improve cooperation between top-level sports federations and disability sports associations and, secondly, to further communication between the various sports, i.e. between the relevant national sports federations. Such opportunities are provided by, among others, an annual national conference organised by the CPC at which, for example, challenges facing sport generally are discussed, along with possibilities of surmounting them (issues such as classification, recruiting campaigns, etc.).

Own the podium (OTP) is a programme of cooperation between the main funding agencies of Canadian competitive sport, namely Sport Canada, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and the Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC). With the financial support of Sport Canada, around C$62 million annually is disbursed through the Own the Podium programme for

competitive summer and winter sports.39 The sports federations receive certain proportions of the funding to pay directly to members of national teams with medal-winning potential, to finance top-class coaching staff or to provide services in the areas of sports science and sports medicine for OTP-funded athletes. The funding is also used to finance full-time administrative

staff in the sphere of competitive sport.40

Canadian Sport Centres (CSC) were founded by Sport Canada, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and the Coaching Association Canada (CAC) with the aim of providing high- performance athletes and coaches with the best possible training conditions under which services (in the sense of multi-sport services) were offered in the following areas: performance services, life services, coaching services and business services. This concept

39 See http://www.ownthepodium2010.com/Partners/government.aspx (retrieved 18.07.2011). C$62 million are around

€45 million (at a conversion rate of €0.7415 = C$1 on 18th July 2011).

40 See http://www.ownthepodium2010.com/Funding/sdetails.aspx?id=17 (retrieved 18.07.2011).

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receives financial support from provincial governments. The first CSC was founded in Calgary in 1994, and there are now eight centres in the whole of Canada (Calgary, Manitoba, British

Columbia, Ontario, Atlantic Canada, Montreal, Saskatchewan, Victoria).41 For many Paralympic athletes, however, whose mobility is much more restricted than that of their counterparts in Olympic sports, the geographic locations of these centres are not always convenient so that proportionally they are used by fewer Paralympic athletes than Olympic athletes. In principle, these training centres can be used by all Canadian talent squad members who are supported by the Athlete Assistance Programme (AAP) referred to above.

The majority of National Sport Federations (NSF) in Canada incorporate both non-disability and disability sport. The first step towards this integrative development was taken in the early 1990s by Swimming Canada. At that time the shift towards an integrated society was initiated by the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and taken up and supported by Swimming Canada. All national sports federations were urged at the time to integrate the disability sport into their particular sport and faced financial sanctions if they failed to comply. Up to present almost all federations have followed this policy; only basketball is still separated today into Basketball Canada and Wheelchair Basketball Canada. The integrated national sports federations also act as the National Governing Body (NGB) for their particular Paralympic sport. The degree of integration in the sense of equality between disability and non-disability sport varies among the national sports federations, with Swimming Canada, Alpine Canada, Hockey Canada, Athletics Canada and Archery Canada being named in the interviews as positive examples.

Represented at the national level besides the sports federations are the sports associations for specific disabilities such as the Canadian Wheelchair Sports Association, the Canadian Blind Sports Association, the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association, the Canadian Amputee Sports Association and the Canadian Deaf Sports Association. Some of these associations also act as National Governing Bodies for specific sports; for example the Canadian Blind Sports Association represents goalball while the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association caters for boccia. At the provincial level, sports associations for specific disabilities also exist in the ten provinces such as the Alberta Sports & Recreation Association for the Blind (ASRAB), which offers competitive sports programmes in, for example, athletics, goalball, lawn bowling, powerlifting, tandem cycling and swimming, and the Ontario Wheelchair Sports Association (OWSA), which offers programmes in the areas of athletics, basketball, rugby and tennis. It must be noted, though, that the numbers of organisations and programmes may vary greatly; the dominant provinces in this regard are the four most densely populated provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Québec. According to many interview partners, the great number of organisations produces “a lot of overlap”:

41 As an example see CSC Calgary’s website: http://www.canadiansportcentre.com/ (retrieved 18.07.2011).

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We don’t realise that we’re overlapping each other because we are such a scattered group because the country is so big. We have a lot of overlap because historically that’s just the way it was done to survive. We in Canada are at a pivotal point … we are starting to get strong and sustainable but that means that people, who are used to operating a certain way …, are not needed anymore … Those national sport organisations like Hockey Canada or Swimming Canada – they are the sports experts in our country – were so used to only doing the able- bodied side of stuff that we saw those other (disability) organisations come out. Now our sport side is ready to and capable of embracing the disability side, but there are still the experts from the disability side who needed to be there fifteen years ago … and there is still a bit of territory: ‘You don’t want me to do my job anymore.’ (CAO6)

At the provincial level the sports federations are represented as Provincial Sports Organisations (PSO) which act as intermediaries between sports clubs and other sports organisations at the local level on the one hand and national sports federations on the other. It must be emphasised that the integration of disability and non-disability sport – which, as described above, has been carried out extensively at the national level – has largely failed to materialise so far at the lower levels, i.e. both the provincial and local levels. At the provincial level in particular (quite contrary to what has happened at the national level) there is still an essentially segregated system in place, which was severely criticised in the interviews by a majority of the experts:

In terms of best practices, one of the failures or one of the challenges of our system is that we only did it at the national level, ... I believe incorporating a strategy, even if it is a few years down the line, but for any country about to tackle this, to make sure they have a plan for how to deal with it at the provincial or regional level as well, would be a strong recommendation from our experience, that the failure to deal with that in the same general process has caused significant challenges for us on the development level. (CAO7)

A national coach went on to condemn the lacking will of individual provinces to cooperate:

Our country is so big, that’s the problem … Every province does its own thing. It’s not as if everybody’s getting their act together … And the national federation doesn’t say, ‘Here are the guidelines (for all provinces) and this is what we’re going to do for, say, the next two or three years.’ We haven’t got as far as that yet. Perhaps we’re still at the start. The three big provinces – Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec – are taking the lead here and saying, ‘This is the way we’ve pushed integration forward in the past five years.’ And the other provinces are coming and wanting to see how it works. Maybe then we’ll have integration across the provinces in five or six years. (CAC2)

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According to the majority of our interview partners, no organised support of disability sport takes place at the local level (i.e. below the provincial level) in terms of a systematic integrative club structure. The programmes of able-bodied sports clubs which integrate athletes with a disability vary according to the sport and the province. Up to present it is above all the sports assocations catering for specific disabilities mentioned above at the local level that have been responsible for supporting disability sport, and these include disability- specific multisports in their programmes. When the staff responsible in the sports federations are contacted by sports enthusiasts with disabilities who are interested in finding out about sports club programmes at the local level, the first step is to invite them to introductory workshops / training camps in order to introduce them to the sport they wish to take up before trying to find an individual solution for training at the local level. The fundamental aim is to integrate those interested in a particular sport into an existing non-disability sports club. In the expert interviews it was reported that sports clubs in the areas of swimming and Alpine skiing were regarded as the most progressive in developing integrative sports programmes at the local level in comparison with other sports.

The aim of the national Bridging the Gap (BTG) initiative is, among others, to awaken an interest in wheelchair sport among people with a disability in clinics and rehabilitation centres. During Have-a-Go Days they are introduced to wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis in order “to help you become aware of the sport and recreation options available, and to try out wheelchair sports of your choice”.42

The initiative Soldier On was founded in 2006 as a cooperative project between the Canadian Forces (CF) and the Canadian Paralympic Committee. Today affiliated to the Canadian Forces Personnel and Family Support Services (CFPFSS), it pursues the aim of helping war veterans to lead an active life and of encouraging them to take up sporting activities in programmes geared to their needs in order to help them improve the quality of their lives. In cooperation with the CPC and selected national sports federations (e.g. Athletics Canada and Hockey Canada) training camps (so-called clinics) are offered in which war veterans are introduced to a particular sport by the coaches of the sport’s National Governing Body. Furthermore, sport fit camps take place whose aim is to allow the war wounded an overview of adapted activities and enable them to gain their first experiences with movement. For the transition from recreational to competitive and from there to high-performance sport there is as yet no predetermined or standard pathway. So far, individual solutions have been found for talented veterans who show an interest in competitive sport in cooperation between the CPC and the respective NGB. The long-term aim of senior Canadian officials is to cooperate with the US Wounded Warriors programme in order to give Canadian war veterans the opportunity to take part in the Warrior Games in the USA.

42 See http://www.btgcanada.ca (retrieved 19.09.2013).

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The diagram in Fig. 2 shows the structure of the Canadian (high-performance) disability sport system with the key organisations and key programmes outlined above.

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Fig. 2 Canadian (high-performance) disability sport system: key organisations & programmes

Disability-specific sports organisations Alberta Sports & Recreation Association for the Blind (ASRAB),

Ontario Wheelchair Sports Association (OWSA), etc.

Programmes of the disability-specific

sports organisations

Clinics organised by the NSFs

Mainstream sports clubs that are open to

athletes with a disability

Mixed school teams

Bridging the Gap (BTG) Soldier on

Have-a-go days

Natio

nal level

Pro

vincia

l level L

oca

l level

Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC)

Own the podium (OTP)

Disability-specific sports organisations Canadian Wheelchair Sports Association,

Canadian Blind Sports Association, Canadian Cerebral Palsy Sports Association,

Canadian Amputee Sports Association, Canadian Deaf Sports Association

Canadian Sports Centres (CSC) Calgary, Manitoba, British Columbia, Ontario, Atlantic Canada, Montreal,

Saskatchewan, Victoria

Integrated National Sport Federations (NSF)/ National Governing Bodies (NGB)

Alpine Canada, Archery Canada, Cross Country Canada, Swimming Canada, Athletics Canada, Hockey Canada, Canadian Cycling Association,

Rowing Canada, Equine Canada, etc.

Government Department of Canadian Heritage

Sport Canada

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9.1.2 The UK

UK Sport, established in 1997 as a governmental organisation accountable to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is the main public sponsor of British disability as well as non- disability sport. Financed by revenues from the National Lottery, UK Sport supports the programmes of the British Olympic Committee and the British Paralympic Association (BPA). The funds available for supporting Olympic and Paralympic athletes as part of the World-Class Performance Programme are allocated as follows: firstly, the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) receive funding according to the number of their talent squad members (£55,000 per athlete at podium level per annum and £30,000 per athlete at development level per annum). These funds are used to finance the following needs: world-class coaches; sports science and medicine support; warm weather training and acclimatisation; international competition schedules; athlete development programmes; and access to appropriate training facilities.

In addition to the monies allocated directly by the two umbrella organisations for Olympic and Paralympic sports, there is also the Athlete Personal Award (APA), for which athletes may apply individually. UK Sport describes this additional support as a “contribution to the living and personal sporting costs incurred whilst training and competing as an elite athlete”.43 In the World Class Performance Programme athletes in British elite sport are grouped into three categories: Band A comprises all athletes who have won medals either at the Olympic/ Paralympic Games or in World Championships; Band B includes athletes who have gained places in the top eight at the Olympic/ Paralympic Games; and grouped in Band C are athletes

who have the potential to win medals or gain good places in international competitions.44

According to UK Sport, athletes in Band A received support amounting to a maximum of £27,328, Band B athletes received a maximum of £20,497 and Band C athletes a maximum of £13,664 in 2011/12.45

The British Paralympic Association (BPA)/ Paralympics GB acts as the national Paralympics committee and has 29 member associations, among them the National Governing Bodies such as British Swimming and GB Rowing; the National Disability Sport Organisations (NDSO) like Wheel Power, British Blind Sport (BBS), Cerebral Palsy Sport; and the Home Country Disability Sport Federations like the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS), the Federation of Disability Sport Wales (FDSW), etc. As in Canada, disability sports organisations primarily play a role in connection with programmes at the grass-roots level of sport. Support for athletes with a disability in elite sport is mainly connected with the World Class Performance Programme.

43 See http://www.uksport.gov.uk/pages/athlete-personal-awards/ (retrieved 20.07.2011).

44 See http://www.uksport.gov.uk/pages/how-the-funding-works/ (retrieved 19.07.2011).

45 See UK Sport/Table 1 at: http://www.uksport.gov.uk/pages/athlete-personal-awards/#APA_Podium_Amounts (retrieved 19.07.2011).

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The great majority of National Governing Bodies amalgamate non-disability and disability sport. Besides these, there are non-integrated associations which cater exclusively for disability sport (see Fig. 3). In the description of the tasks and duties of the various organisations at the different levels of sport the following differentiation is made: grass-roots, development, talent and elite. While the national sports federations (e.g. UK Athletics) take care of the elite (and to a limited extent talent) levels of sport, the Home Country Governing Bodies like England Athletics are responsible for the support of the development and talent levels. An important support programme for young athletes trying to reconcile a career in sport with vocational training is the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS). The result of cooperation between national sports federations and various institutions in the education sector, this scheme supports elite-level athletes who are over 16 years of age and compete at least in national championships.

Responsible for the grass-roots category of disability sport at both the local and the Home Nations/ Home Countries levels are specific federations for disability sports like the English Federation of Disability Sport and Scottish Disability Sport. Quite a number of the interview partners mentioned the example of Integrative Mainstream Sports Clubs, which offer sports for people with disabilities. In addition, special initiatives (e.g. an initiative of the English Federation of Disability Sport) support the playing of inclusive sports at club level (cf. Inclusion Club Hub).46 The English Federation of Disability Sport, moreover, in cooperation with various elite sports federations, organises Disability Sports Events at all levels of performance which

are meant to appeal to all persons with disabilities. 47

In all Home Nations there are Institutes of Sport which offer services for elite sport in such areas as sports medicine, physiotherapy, training sciences, biomechanics, nutrition, etc. These facilities are open to all squad athletes in both Olympic and Paralympic sports.

In 2008 the British Army launched the Battle Back programme with the aim of providing injured service personnel with sports and sporting activities at different performance levels.48

Among other things, the scheme includes talent identification in five winter and 19 summer Paralympic sports, sports camps and competitions. Many sporting activities take place in an inclusive setting with the participation of army personnel both with and without disabilities. The Army Sport Control Board coordinates the activities of altogether 45 military sports associations and unions. Battle Back cooperates with the British Paralympic Association (BPA) and the National Governing Bodies of specific sports inasmuch as injured military personnel and military veterans with a service-related disability are explicitly invited to talent search days organised by the BPA and NGBs. If they prove to have talent, the Battle Back programme

46 See http://www.inclusion-club-hub.co.uk/ (retrieved 09.11.2012).

47 See http://www.efds.co.uk/our_work_in_sport/disability_sport_events (retrieved 09.11.2012).

48 See http://www.army.mod.uk/events/23326.aspx (retrieved 09.11.2012).

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allows these individuals to devote themselves full time to preparing for the Paralympic Games on full pay.

In conclusion, it may be stated that, with regard to the British (high-performance) disability sport system, the majority of the British experts interviewed – not unlike the Canadian sample – criticised the plethora of existing organisations with parallel structures: “A previous colleague of mine called it a shark-invested puddle […] It does cause some conflict” (UKO5).

48

Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport

UK Sport

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National Level

British Paralympic Association (BPA)/ Paralympics GB

Home Country Elite Pan-Disability Sports Organisation English Federation of Disability Sport Federation of Disability Sport Wales

Scottish Disability Sport Disability Sport Northern Ireland

Home Country Sports Institutes English Institute of Sport, Scottish Institute of Sport Welsh Institute of Sport

Sports Institute Northern Ireland

Training groups of the NDSOs

45 military sports associations/unions managed by

the Army Sport Control Board & Battle

Disability Sports Events (DSE) (England only)= pan-disability competitions

Fig. 3 British (high-performance) disability sport system: key organisations & programmes

Sport England Sport Scotland Sport Council for Wales Sport Northern Ireland

Mainstream sports clubs that are open to athletes with a disability & Inclusion Club Hub Mixed (integrated) school teams

Home Country Governing Bodies e.g. England Athletics, Scottish Athletics,

Welsh Athletics

Youth Sport Trust (England only) Sport and PE at school level

Level of H

om

e Co

un

tries Lo

cal level

Non-integrated National Governing Bodies representing Paralympic Sports

Great Britain Wheelchair Basketball Association Great Britain Wheelchair Rugby

Association Goalball UK GB Boccia Federation

British Table Tennis Association for the Disabled British Sledge Hockey Association

Disability Snowsport UK

Integrated National Governing Bodies (NGBs) Amateur Rowing Association

Amateur Swimming Federation of Great Britain

British Amateur Weight Lifting Association British Biathlon Union

British Cycling Federation British

Dressage British Fencing Association

British Ice Hockey

Association British Judo Association British Tennis

Foundation British Volleyball Federation

Grand National Archery Society National Smallbore Rifle

Association Royal Yachting Association Snowsport GB

UK Athletics

(UK

National Disability Sports Organisations (NDSOs)

British Amputee and Les Autres Sports Association (BALASA) British Blind Sport (BBS)

British Wheelchair Sports Foundation

Cerebral Palsy Sport (CP Sport) Wheel Power

Sports Association for People with Learning Disability) (UK Deaf Sport, UKDS)

Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS)

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9.1.3 The USA

The majority of our interview partners named two bodies as the most important organisations for disability sport in the United States: US Paralympics (in particular for the support of elite sport) and the national disability sports organisations (in particular for the support of grass- roots sport). In contrast to the structural characteristics of disability sport in Canada and the UK, the (non-integrated) elite sports federations (of able-bodied sport), such as USA Swimming and USA Track & Field, play no major role in Paralympic sports.

A topic that was repeatedly brought up in the interviews was the radical change that took place in 2001 regarding the organisation of disability sport in the United States. Prior to this, there was a clear distinction between and segregation of the two types of sport, with a disability specific system running parallel to able-bodied sport. While the elite sports federations were exclusively responsible for non-disability sports, disability specific organisations such as Wheelchair Sports USA, Disability sports USA, the US Cerebral Palsy Athletic Association and the US Association of Blind Athletes were in charge of organising disability sport. Affiliated to the US Olympics Committee (USOC), which is the umbrella organisation for sports in the USA, the disability sports organisations were grouped together in the Board of the US Disability Sports Team and received their funding directly from this body.

In 2001 US Paralympics was founded as a division of US Olympics (USOC) and since then has taken over the administration of the areas competitive/elite sport in all Paralympic sports. This reorganisation is looked upon critically by senior officials of disability sports federations since the direct funding by US Olympics has ceased and the organisations are now financially on a weak – or at least weaker – footing. Moreover, it is criticised that the area of responsibility of the disability sports organisations has since drastically depleted.

The disability sports organisations don’t receive the same level of funding that they used to receive from the US Olympic Committee [...] They don’t have the same level of responsibility, either, that they used to have. (USO4)

The disability sports organisations listed above still exist but their focus has shifted, so that their main attention has turned to sport for all and recreational sports (grass-roots sports) and supporting new talent (development sports). Several organisations help athletes interested in taking up competitive sports in their search for competent coaches or form sports groups themselves at the local level; they also offer so-called sports samplers and clinics to try out various sports, as well as organising disability-specific competitions at both regional and national levels. These competitions, in turn, are made use of by many national coaches in order to identify talent.

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At the national level there are currently seven disability sports organisations in the USA:

BlazeSports National Disability Sports Alliance (BNDSA) Dwarf Athletic Association of America (DAAA) Disability sports USA (DS/USA) Special Olympics (SO) United States Association of Blind Athletes USA Deaf Sports Federation (USADSF) Wheelchair and Ambulatory Sports USA (WASUSA)

According to several interview partners the individual national disability sports organisations have different foci: some tend to be active in the fields of sport for all, recreational sports and rehabilitation sports while others see their commitment (and competence) in the support of competitive sport – organising, as described above, competitions and championships. (In the interviews the United States Association of Blind Athletes was named as being exemplary in this regard.) Several national disability sports organisations, moreover, are explicitly responsible for the development of elite athletes in sports in which there is otherwise no National Governing Body (the United States Association of Blind Athletes, for example, acts as the national elite sport federation for goalball and the National Disability Sports Alliance as the national elite sport federation for boccia).

In the wake of the reorganisation of the US sport system in 2001 outlined above (i.e. a shift from a disability-specific towards a sport-specific system) the responsibility for both Olympic and Paralympic sports was originally assigned to the elite sports federations of able-bodied sport. According to our experts the implementation of this new concept has so far been rather inadequate, with the result that US Paralympics, for example, still acts today as the National Governing Body for swimming, athletics and cycling in order to ensure the success of the three sports with the most competitors. One interview partner stressed in this context:

It is not integrated […] The only part we are integrated in is the United States Olympic Committee. It has both traditional track and field and Paralympic track and field underneath its umbrella. So we are integrated at the top. I would say, we are probably five per cent integrated […] We have a good working relationship […] but we design our own programme, we have our own budget […] we run our own national championships, separate national championships. So we are probably more separate than together […] It isn’t the same as for example in Canada where they have more or less a completely integrated system with common national governing bodies […] We are not even close to that. (USC3)

One athlete pointed out in her interview that it would be helpful – not least in view of the visibility of disability sport in the media – if there were integrated national elite sports federations in the three popular sports mentioned:

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Track and field, cycling and swimming are big sports. US Paralympics controls us, which isn’t bad. But I think it does affect funding; it affects support in the media […] It would be really helpful for track and field to be with US Track and Field because it is so well known […] US Track and Field doesn’t really want to do it because they know it will cost them more money, so unless they know that they will get more money, they don’t want to deal with us. (USA6)

In the USA there are different opportunities for athletes with disabilities to take up sporting activities: either they enrol in programmes offered by one of the national disability sports organisations at the local or regional level or they take part in the activities of local mainstream sports clubs, where they are introduced to the sport of their choice along with people without disabilities, enter open competitions, etc. This latter opportunity means athlete development in the (integrated) system of able-bodied sport, as described by a US- American federation official:

Many of our Paralympic eligible swimmers swim in USA Swimming member clubs or with USA Swimming member coaches. But they don’t officially have the governance for the sport […] US Paralympics works with them very closely, as we do with cycling and athletics as well as with the national governing bodies in regards to competitions, officials, coaches, athlete development, but they don’t take over the operations for what we consider to be our top level of the programme, which are the national teams, the national junior team, the Paralympic team. We still oversee all of that part of that sport. (USO3)

An official working in a disability sports organisation pointed out that the end of the complete segregation of disability and non-disability sport now gave people interested in sport more choice with regard to the training environment. On the other hand, she said, there was too little communication and cooperation between the organisations involved – both on the part of disability sport and on the part of non-disability sport. The result of this was, for example, that information about identified talents was not passed on:

We have athletes who got involved with USA Swimming or the Track and Field group because of their local affiliation … We are not aware how many go to the international competition […] At the end, there are more dwarfs there than the ones that we have identified […] We still have a few athletes that never come through our organisation, but they are part of USA Swimming. That is why we are not aware of all the athletes that end up in the Paralympic system. (USO6)

The need for better communication and cooperation, however, applies not only to those responsible for disability / non-disability sport but also, according to an expert, to the different players involved in the disability sport system:

We all realised that we need to do more cooperative activity in partnerships and

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information sharing […] If someone is hit by an automobile and loses a leg or becomes paralysed, then they may go in and take a lesson in cycling or skiing from a community programme, but they do not know right away that there is a thing called Paralympics, and that they can go there. (USO1)

Besides the development of disability sport, a key concern of US Paralympics and especially its Community Programme is to give people with physical disabilities the opportunity of doing sport regularly.49 Its aim is to set up a network of Paralympic Sport Clubs in communities all over the country. The institutions operating these Paralympic Sport Clubs may be non-profit organisations, rehabilitation clinics, schools, colleges or universities.

With regard to the existing system generally, several interview partners criticised the fact that the areas of responsibilities and competences of the organisations named above tended to be vague and ambiguous at the various levels:

In competition at the elite level, at the top level, the US Paralympics is responsible for the very best athletes in a number of different sports and disabilities. But when you go to the grass-roots level, the structure in the United States is very fragmented and diffused. There are a number of groups that conduct recreational sports activities either as part of a national federation like Disability Sports USA or Wheelchair Sports USA […] There are also individual recreation groups that are not affiliated with a national group, which operate in various metropolitan city areas of the United States. So you have a situation where there are many different players in the field. They are either conducting sports for rehabilitation and recreation, and/or doing some competition leading up to the Paralympics […] The role of the organisations is fairly narrow […] As you get higher towards the elite level, then the roles of our various organisations become a little bit more focused. (USO1)

49 See http://www.teamusa.org/US-Paralympics/Community.aspx (retrieved 02.11.2012).

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National (disability-

specific) competitions

Sports groups in

hosptitals/ rehab

centres

Non-Profit Sports groups (recreational sports but with the option of competition participation)

US Olympics (USOC)

US Paralympics as national Paralympic committee (division of US Olympics)

National disability

sports organisations

BlazeSports National Disability

Sports Alliance (BNDSA)

Dwarf Athletic Association of

America (DAAA)

Disability sports USA (DS/USA)

Special Olympics (SO)

United States Association of

Blind Athletes

USA Deaf Sports Federation

(USADSF)

US Paralympics

Community Programme

Paralympic Sport Clubs

(Integrated or segregated)

sports in leisure centres of

communities and/or in

schools

Regional competitions

(talent seeking opportunity

for national coaches)

(Clinics)

Talent Introduction Days

Mainstream Sports Clubs’ schemes to

integrate people with a disability

Independent recreational sports-

oriented groups not affiliated to a

national organisation

Fig. 4 US-American (disability) sport system

Na

tion

al level

Reg

ion

al level

Co

mm

un

ity level

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9.2 Results of the qualitative interview study

In the following the main results of the qualitative data analysis are presented. In keeping with the theoretical framework of the study and the procedures proposed by Rütten et al. (2005), the focus of the analysis is placed on selected determinants belonging to the category of structure: aims, resources and commitments. In addition, a concluding sub-section headed “Evaluation” looks into the key challenges which the experts we interviewed are currently faced with. Prefixed to each sub-section are the specific issues of the determinants analysed.

The findings of the study, as well as their interpretation, are substantiated by (sometimes quite extensive) quotes from the interview texts in order to ensure the authencity and plausibility of the interpretations. The quotations guarantee that our assertions are as close as possible to reflecting reality, which is of course the aim of the qualitative research approach. We reproduce, on the one hand, typical statements made by the interview partners in their various functions (officials, coaches and athletes) in the discussion of a particular issue complex; on the other hand, we also take into consideration statements which deviate from the majority view. Deviating perspectives which emerge from interview partners of different nationalities are compared and contrasted with one another. After each issue complex has been dealt with, the preliminary results are briefly outlined again and discussed.

9.2.1 Aims

Issues

1. Which aims are pursued on the part of the federations with regard to talent identification and development?

2. Which aims are pursued on the part of coaches with regard to talent identification and development?

3. Are these aims laid down in writing?

The interviews showed clearly that for the majority of the members of the study group – across all the different groups and countries – the key aim of talent identification and development lay in the recruitment of a sufficient number of people interested in sport at the grass-roots level. In disability sport, of course, the pool from which talent can be recruited is

considerably smaller than is the case in able-bodied sport.50 Thus, the majority of the officials and coaches responsible for disability sport that we interviewed saw their primary aim in being able to rely on an adequate pool of new generations of athletes.

50 See Chapter 3, where this issue is dealt with.

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It was pointed out in the interviews that the existence of rules for talent identification and development in the various sports in written form presupposed the existence of a corresponding systematic programme. In all three countries, however, the majority of the experts interviewed – irrespective of their function or the sport they represented – reported that no such programme existed in their field of activity. This means in reality that if, in the individual sports federations and associations, specific concepts were drawn up for talent identification and development in terms of a strategic, target-oriented planning, these were either unknown to the majority of our interview partners or the plans existed on paper but could not be put into practice due to a lack of resources. Because of this apparent lack of any systematic development programmes containing clearly formulated goals – as seems to be the case in the majority of sports – it is above all the personal aims pursued by the interview partners in seeking and developing talent that are presented in the following.

Canada

Since 2004 the Canadian government has funded the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) programme.51 A national initiative encompassing all sports, the scheme was launched as the result of an evaluation process carried out after the 2004 Olympic/ Paralympic Games by the Canadian national umbrella organisation, Sport Canada, as an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian national squads in each sport. Its aim is the long-term talent development of athletes with and without disabilities; consisting of seven steps, it contains the phases of talent identification and development, as well as the transition from competitive sport to life-long sports practice. Oriented not so much towards the calendar/ chronological age of athletes but rather towards their training age or performance age (“the maturation level of an individual”), it provides specific instructions for coaches in the individual training phases. It was developed as a standard LTAD framework, whose implementation lies in the hands of the individual sports federations.52

Athletes with disabilities go through the same training stages as able-bodied athletes; only the age groups allotted to the individual stages differ. The fact that Canadian Paralympics competitors are growing older and increasing numbers of athletes are ending their careers in sport has obliged the officials responsible to take the offensive and deal with the lack of new talent by adapting the LTAD programme to athletes with disabilities. The additional programme, No Accidental Champion, takes account of the expected long-term performance pattern of athletes with disabilities and specifies the contents of the individual training stages

(no ages given; cf. Table 13).53 Of particular significance for disability sport are the stages

51 See http://www.canadiansportforlife.ca/ (retrieved 15.02.2011).

52 Zugriff am unter http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/sc/init/ltad-eng.cfm (retrieved 13.11.2012).

53 See http://canadiansportforlife.ca/sites/default/files/resources/No%20Accidental%20Champions.pdf (retrieved 13.11.2012).

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Awareness Raising and First Contact, as expressed in the interview of an official of the Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC):

There are two additional phases that we created for the Paralympic sports at the very start level. The first is awareness; you don't really have to worry about that on the Olympic side too much, but just the basic awareness level we inserted, and then we also put in first contact for the Paralympic side. (CAO7)

Table 13 LTAD programme for athletes with disabilities: stages/contents & aims54

Stages in the LTAD programme (Contents) Aims

Active Start

Learning basic movement and motor skills (like running, jumping, hopping, wheeling, twisting, throwing/catching, rolling, bouncing, climbing, swimming, skiing) = Physical Literacy

No sedentary activity for more than 60 minutes at a time (except when sleeping)

Taking part in organised sporting activities

Exploring risks and limits in a safe environment

Daily physical activity

Awareness raising

A recently acquired disability may mean that sporting activities engaged in previously cannot be continued. New opportunities in sport must be explored

People with a disability are often not aware of the physical and sporting activities available to them. Following the acquisition of a disability, individuals may lack knowledge about how to take up sporting activities (again)

Sports organisations need to develop awareness plans to make their programmes known to the public

FUNdamentals

Different sensory disabilities require different learning approaches to physical activity on the part of trainers/instructors

Focus on general, overall motor-skills training, taking into account physical, cognitive and emotional development

Elements of athletics: running, throwing, jumping and wheeling

Strength training/gymnastics with a medicine ball and exercises with their own body weight

First contact/Recruitment

The aim is to create a positive, welcoming environment for the programme of games and (perhaps first) sporting activities

Research shows that a first positive contact with sport is of crucial importance for potential athletes so that they develop a life-long attachment to sport. By contrast, if the first experience of sport is negative, it may be that long-term barriers prevent them from taking up sporting activities

54 Taken from: http://www.canadiansportforlife.ca/upload/docs/LTAD%20Downloads%20Eng/No%20Accidental%

20Champions%20Poster.pdf (retrieved 02.10.2007 for our pilot project).

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Introducing simple rules and ethics of sport/ sports games

No periodisation, but well-structured programmes

Daily physical activity

Learning to Train

Key stage of skills learning. All basic movement and sports skills training must be completed by this stage.

Overall physical, mental, cognitive and emotional development

Introducing mental preparation

Strength training/gymnastics with a medicine ball and exercises with their own body weight

Introducing ancillary capacities (warming-up exercises, stretching, nutrition, recuperation measures, etc.)

Single or double periodisation of training

Sport-specific training three times a week; participation in other sports three times a week

Gradual introduction to training in a specific sport

Training to Train

Key stage of developing physical fitness: endurance, strength and speed

Overall physical, mental, cognitive and emotional development

Developing fundamental mental skills

Introducing strength training with free weights

Developing ancillary capacities (warming-up exercises, stretching, nutrition, recuperation measures, etc.)

Regular musculoskeletal assessment

Single or double periodisation of training

Sport-specific training six to nine times per week including complementary sports

Intensifying sport-specific training

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Training to Compete

Sport-, event- and position-specific physical conditioning

Sport-, event- and position-specific technical and tactical preparation

Sport-, event- and position-specific technical and playing skills training under competitive conditions

Overall physical, mental, cognitive and emotional development

Advanced mental preparation

Optimising ancillary capacities (warming- up exercises, stretching, nutrition, recuperation measures, etc.)

Single, double or triple periodisation of training

Sport-specific technical, tactical and fitness training 9-12 times per week

Introduction to competitive sport

Training to Win

Maintaining or improving physical capacities

Developing further technical, tactical and playing skills

Modelling/optimising all possible aspects of training and performance

Integrating regular recovery breaks to avoid injuries

Optimising ancillary capacities (warming- up exercises, stretching, nutrition, recuperation measures, etc.)

Single, double, triple or multiple periodisation of training

Sport-specific technical, tactical und fitness training 9-15 times per week

Focus on high-performance sport

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There are different opinions to be heard in the sports federations about the actual implementation of the aims formulated by the LTAD programme. One official of the umbrella organisation Sport Canada pointed out in her interview that the LTAD model developed by Canadian Sport for Life had been put into practice by roughly 70 per cent of all sports federations.

Now about seventy per cent of the sports have gone through it, that is a rough guess, and they are now moving into the next stage which is called the competition review – which is where they look at the way in which their sport is structured and the way in which people move through the sport and making adaptations in line with long-term athlete development. (CAO2)

Another female interview partner, who worked for the Canadian Paralympic Committee, had a completely different view of the implementation of the LTAD programme:

It's also not actually implemented. That's the missing piece. It's all nice to have this model that we put on the wall, but no one actually uses it so. (CAO6)

A further colleague saw the need for action in this connection as lying above all in the area of responsibility of the Paralympic Committee:

We don't have a system that can identify our athletes yet, so I think we have many people with disabilities that we're not pulling into our system yet … A few of our leading sports have started to implement the LTAD, but many others are still early in the implementation process as to how are they actually going to roll out what they're saying they need to do in order to best develop athletes. What we're looking at is for that first stage of the LTAD, it would be the responsibility of the Canadian Paralympic Committee to launch a national awareness programme promoting Paralympic sport

Active for Life

The opportunity for individuals to beActive for Life increases with the length of time they take part in sporting activities. (Achieving Physical Literacy before the Training to Train phase is decisive).

There is also the opportunity to transferfrom one sport to another in the courseof a sporting life

Moving from highly competitive sport to life-long competitive sport by taking partin age-group competitions makes thedecision to end a sporting career easier

Ensuring being physically Active for Life with a minimum of 60 minutes of moderate daily activity or 30 minutes of intense daily activity foradults

Former competitive athletes find new fields of activity by working full time or in a voluntarycapacity in sport or as a coach. In this way theystay committed to sport

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and encouraging people to get involved and then we would deliver those people to the programmes offered by each of our various sports. (CAO7)

According to those responsible it is the primary aim of the Canadian Paralympic Committee to instigate and put initiatives on seeking and developing talent into practice: “It’s the awareness, the recruitment, the talent identification, and just having a clear pathway for an athlete to go from their first experience to get up to a provincial or regional team” (CAO7). For this grass-roots work there would have to be close cooperation between the various organisations involved in order to avoid overlapping areas of competence as far as possible: “changing the roles and responsibilities of certain organisations within the system to be more effective, to eliminate the duplication” CAO7).

Although the topic of the LTAD programme was raised by several experts working at the level of Sport Canada and the Canadian Paralympic Committee in their interviews, it was conspicuous that scarcely any officials of the sports federations mentioned the programme themselves. When asked about it, they mostly replied that the programme had so far not been put to use. Several interview partners drew attention to the fact that, compared with able-bodied sports, a lack of resources prevented a systematic, target-oriented strategy for talent identification and development. The following comments from the areas of Alpine and Nordic skiing exemplify this:

Main talent identification is not available in Para-sport, or it is not in place yet. (CAO3)

There is no sustainable system in place to draw talent over the long term … There is a coach out there somewhere that is interested in Para and doing good work. (CAO5)

In only two of the five sports we examined did our interview partners voice their satisfaction with a target-oriented strategy for identifying and developing talent. In swimming and basketball, namely, words of praise were to be heard:

In 2005/2006, swimming was one of the first sports to be developing their model and to be sure that they were integrating the athletes with a disability component. (CAO2)

I think we do a relatively good job. We have a programme called ‘Centres for Performance’ and this is actually a programme that we modelled after Canada Basketball where it is a talent identification programme, so athletes that have been or are already identified from the grass-roots system are probably in clubs and are playing on a team or they are playing locally or house league. If they show potential for national teams or that next level elite performance, then they are targeted and brought into these National Performances Centres. (CAO3)

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A systematic, target-oriented strategy of talent identification and development is seemingly dependent on whether there are individuals in federations who actively campaign for such programmes. The interviews indicated that in this respect it was above all the coaches that were the driving forces behind such initiatives. Thus, according to our interview partners, the strategic concepts of many coaches – and these do indeed exist – are based not so much on the aims or guidelines published in official federation documents (such as the competitive sport guidelines) but rather on their own initiatives.55 It was revealed in the interviews that the coaches – from their own experience and everyday practice – diagnosed in many cases an urgent need for action in various areas of the system and endeavoured to meet these needs with target-oriented measures. Examples of the comments of several coaches regarding their own current goals are reproduced below.

At the level of sports body officials a rather negative picture was given of talent identification and development concepts as well as the precise aims underlying them. By contrast, most of the coaches interviewed had quite clear ideas about their goals – even if these appeared to be rarely formulated in writing. Their interviews reflected the impression that an overarching aim existed across all sports that the pool of people with a disability interested in sport on which they could rely in their work as coaches needed to be enlarged so that in the long term they would be able to build an adequate pool of talent. In order to achieve this overarching aim, the coaches applied different strategies (or defined aims for themselves) which they described in the quotes that follow.

A Nordic skiing coach urged athletes from his training group to use their networks of contacts in order to recruit people with a disability interested in sport by talking enthusiastically about their own sporting activities and persuading them to take part in a trial training session:

We use the athletes from the B team to recruit new talent all year. We use their personal networks because these are the people who know other people with disabilities – people who we as coaches [without a disability] don’t know at all. The athletes, of course, mix in circles where there are other people with disabilities. When they tell them about their sport and show how enthusiastic they are about it – there’s a chance it’ll work. It works in Ontario at least […] Whether we can achieve our aim [i.e. to recruit more talent] in this way, I don’t know […] but we’ve invented something that not every country has, and we’ll see how it turns out […] I asked my athletes if they’d all join in – I set it as a ‘challenge’ for the team […] I laid down the aim for the team that everyone has

55 The wheelchair basketball federations in Canada, the USA and the UK are exceptions in this respect. These federations

have their own programme/strategy plans with their particular objectives. See, for example, the Strategic Plan 2009- 2013 of Wheelchair Basketball Canada at: http://www.wheelchairbasketball.ca/uploadedFiles/About_Us/ Resources/Strategic_Plans/2009-2013%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf?n=7253 (retrieved 14.11.2012).

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got to find two or three young people in one year […] It works quite well really. (CAC1)

A colleague from swimming developed three personal objectives by means of which he wished to recruit talented swimmers. First of all, he aimed at improving the communication and information policy for parents of children with disabilities.

There would be two teams of people that may travel around the country […] You would hire some summer students and put them in a motor home […] and they just drive across the country. And in every major city, they advertise and say, ‘All right! Come and learn about Para. Come and have a go.’ […] People would be able to get in a basketball wheelchair […] or meet some Paralympic swimmers […] stuff like that where we would be able to expose people […] One of the biggest things that we sort of flagged is: How do we get to the parents? Because that’s the key factor in all of this. Getting to the parents and having them understand: your child with a disability has the opportunity to do sport. And there are all the benefits that your child will get from participating in sport […] We need an awareness plan […] to develop partnerships with the people out there in the world that deal with parents of children with disabilities on a daily basis. (CAC2)

His second objective was to set up a general (i.e. not specific to one sport) basic sports skills training programme for children with disabilities:

There’s no physical literacy programme for young kids with disabilities […] That’s an absolutely crucial part of it because here you go, by the time the kid is 6 or 7, his able-bodied peers have progressed immensely, and he's got zero skills. (CAC2)

His third objective was to compile a database of athletes with disabilities in order to be able follow the pathways of individuals and prevent possible “drop-outs” from sport:

Another idea is […] developing a national disability database where we would essentially start tracking all the athletes with a disability […] If a kid started playing soccer […] and all of a sudden stopped playing soccer, where did that kid go? Did they go to another Paralympic sport or did they fall off the grid? […] We are developing sort of infrastructure and capacity around and doing a better job and trying to eliminate that accidental thing. (CAC2)

In addition, the swimming expert raised the question of continued training for coaches as an important objective so that the training of newly recruited athletes was actually successful. Apart from organising an annual meeting of all swimming coaches working at the national level, he has initiated together with colleagues the publication of a manual for coaches whose first chapters have already been completed. For the near future he has planned to compile an online library which contains, among other things, videos with information about different

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types of disability and tips on possible methods of training. His aim is to remove certain anxieties that coaches in able-bodied sports may have when working with athletes with disabilities and provide them with the necessary resources:

I do an annual carded coaches meeting, and, a lot of times, it is one of the best things that we do in the sense that we bring all the national-level coaches together for two days and we are able to educate them a little bit and provide them with information and stuff. But what that does is: they go back and they start talking to their buddies […] and what we're seeing is that coaches all of the sudden start coaching their athletes differently […] We've developed the first phase of our coaches’ handbook. So if a coach has an athlete with cerebral palsy, the coach will be able to get the cerebral palsy section of the coaches’ handbook and be able to get some basic information about what a CP hemiplegic is able to do. And all of a sudden, they're able to have a standard. They are no experts but they at least have a standard working knowledge of cerebral palsy and head injuries […] We'll have our online coaching video library resource online, where there's going to be a searchable video clip database where you would be able to go in and say, ‘I'm looking for CP backstroke turns.’ So we're developing these coaching resources so that our coaches in the field have the ability to feel more comfortable and we're all in belief that as coaches become more comfortable with an understanding of disability and disability swimming, they're going to start coaching the way they need to coach and not being afraid that ‘I don't know how to coach a kid’. (CAC2)

An interview partner from wheelchair basketball set himself the aim of putting together a pool of 48 top athletes all in all so that each position in the team is manned by altogether four players:

One of my goals for talent identification in Canada is to try to develop a list of forty-eight athletes that could make the team, 48. We just picked this number […] a number that we thought we could work with […] so a member on the team and three substitutes behind them […] so that they either can move up the system or, as we just had this year, injuries and players not ready to participate, so that they can be replaced by someone who is underneath them. (CAC3)

In his interview the coach pointed out the difference between the individual objectives that all coaches set themselves and the collective aims formulated by the federations. He described his own actions as wholly target-oriented while the strategy of the federation he regarded as deficient since it failed to offer any guiding aims as orientation. His federation, Wheelchair Basketball Canada, was denied funding on the part of the Own the podium programme in the past, he said, since it lacked a written strategic plan for talent development. At the time, the officials responsible for the Own the podium funding programme recommended that the federation establish contact with Basketball Canada, which had already done good work in

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the sphere of developing talent. In the meantime, in particular through the professionalisation of the coaching staff and a reorganisation of the areas of responsibility, the issue of talent development had come to the attention of senior federation officials – although a written formulation of strategic aims was still lacking today:

They recognised that our basketball development was not where it should be. So they put us in touch with Basketball Canada, who had done a good job in the stand-up sport […] And they said, ‘We see that your talent identification and talent development programme is really haphazard. There is no system to it […] If we are going to give you this money, you have to develop a development programme.’ So that is what Wheelchair Basketball Canada, our governing body, what they did: they took this money and hired a head coach, myself, and hired some other people full- time. Besides delivering the programme that you would see on the basketball court, or the team that you see on the basketball court, we are now also charged with trying to develop a whole athlete pathway […] With all the work we have to do to try to catch up to the system that OTP [Own the podium] wants us to build we have compartmentalised. We have given everyone different responsibilities to complete parts of our programme development and the athlete pathway […] So that document has not been developed yet, but it does handle the athlete pathway. (CAC3)

It emerged from the interviews that in the opinions of both officials and coaches the leading role in formulating and implementing objectives in Canadian sport was played by swimming. In the other sports – and also with regard to the cooperation between the different sports – there was a great need for change. In order to remedy the inadequate communication between the different sport-specific organisations (i.e. the National Sports Federations – NSFs), a workshop organised by the Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) took place in August 2008 with the participation of experts from the various sports (mainly coaches), whose task was to draw up common future objectives and procedures. What clearly emerged from the workshop was the importance of the first two stages of the LTAD programme, namely Awareness raising and First contact:

If we look at it from a systemic standpoint, I would say that there are pockets across the country and pockets inside the LTAD that are very good, be we're not solidly uniformed through all the areas […] At the CPC meeting last week we identified that each national sport federation is out there battling and doing the same stuff: looking for athletes […] But if we had a national first contact and awareness programme that was functioning and really working well [it would be very helpful]. The CPC's role would be to act as a clearing house […] It was a lot of brainstorming […] One of the things we talked about was developing a programme where there would be two teams of people that may travel around the country […] We would hire some summer students and put them in a motor home. One team starts on the West coast and one on the East coast and they just drive across the country. And at every major city, they advertise and say, ‘Come and learn about Para-sport.’ We called it a ‘Have-a-go day’.

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People would be able to come to wherever, and get in a wheelchair basketball chair or get in a racing chair, or meet some Paralympic swimmers or stuff like that where we would be able to expose people to the whole Paralympic thing. (CAC2)

The UK

In collaboration with organisations like Youth Sport Trust, Paralympics GB and UK Sport, Sport England has launched the programme Playground to Podium as a strategy of talent identification and development overarching the sports federations and focusing on six sports: athletics, swimming, wheelchair basketball, boccia, football and table tennis. The aim of the programme is, through cooperation with schools and the special schooling of sports teachers, to identify pupils with physical disabilities or visual impairments who take part in talent

training camps in their part of the country (so-called county athlete assessment).56 The Playground to Podium programme is one of British Swimming’s two strategies for recruiting new talent; the other is the federation’s own “talent days”:

There are two streams. There are our British Swimming talent ID days, but there's also a programme called ‘Playground to Podium’. Those participants are up to 16 at the moment, but we can run other days that can invite people that are a bit older. The ‘Playground to Podium’ people are very much focused on the school-aged athletes as it is an education and sport-linked programme […] We may find one in a group of 20 that may have some potential talent. And then if we do find those people, we will then fast track them for classification. So the next available opportunity for that person: we will get him classified. You can't truly identify somebody until they've been classified. (UKO7)

Several interview partners from different countries pointed out that in the recruiting process the aim must be to examine as soon as possible whether or not interested athletes are classifiable. A British expert stressed that all recruitment measures were useless as long as potential athletes were not classified. The fact that especially those working at the grass-roots level often lacked expertise in classifying athletes was a problem:

The critical thing in swimming is that until the athletes have been classified, they can't be talent ID'd […] We can look at their swimming ability and say, ‘That guy is a good swimmer.’ I can look at him and say, because I've got a classification background, ‘He could fit somewhere here and here.’ We've had a lot of issues in the past with people anticipating and trying to guess what classification an athlete will be, and it leads to a lot of upset when they're not in that classification. (UKO7)

56 Retrieved 24.02.2011 at http://www.sportengland.org/supportadvice/playground_to_podium.aspx

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According to the experts it is not until fairly recently that the subject of systematic talent recruitment has been discussed among members of the British athletics federation UK Athletics. Our interview partners attribute this reorientation to an extensive change in staff at the levels of both officials and coaches. The Playground to Podium programme was not mentioned at all in the interview:

We've just started looking at the talent ID. I look currently after the development level athletes, which are currently 17 throughout the country, and their services and their training and competition programmes with their personal coaches. And then other than that, we go and look at athletes who are just below getting to the funding structure and what we do with them is that we set them up with monthly meetings. That's our […] identification spot […] We do a talent intro day, which literally is a 'come and try it day' to see if anybody is interested. When people come along, we give them a classification […] We've got paid coaches and we'll just have a look to see if any of them is classifiable – what is essential. And if they do, we get back to them, so that we can see them yet again. (UKO3)

In wheelchair basketball talent scouts are regularly engaged to identify promising new players, but the concrete aims of this process have yet to be formulated. It is assumed that talent recruitment works – even when clearly defined procedures are nowhere laid down in writing:

[TID] is not sort of something that you do purposefully. I think it's something that happens […] If I go through the details of what happens generally: we have a junior tournament; we'll have a junior programme. So we'll have national championships, junior players coming up. The coaches will be there, the full-time coaches will be there, they'll start to scout and identify the next batch of talented players. And we look to run a camp, a talent camp for those trying. From there, they become our potential next group of GB players that we look to develop from there. (UKO9)

The USA

Especially when compared with the interviews of the Canadian experts, the comments of the US officials and coaches on the existence of written concepts of talent identification and development (which contain, for example, information about guiding principles and strategic objectives) are rather vague. This is exemplified in a statement made on this subject by an athletics coach: “Well, that’s where we become a little mixed” (USC3).

Since, unlike Canada and the UK, the USA has no integrated (sport-specific) federations in most sports, US Paralympics assumes the function of the national governing body in several sports, for example athletics, swimming, cycling and skiing. In the interviews with senior US Paralympics officials the procedures of talent recruitment and development were described, although there was no explicit mention of a system. The guiding aim was characterised as

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identifying talent and developing it further (“trying to identify talent and help them continue on” – USO3), although in skiing, for example, officials had only in the last year or so begun to look into the issue of systematic talent recruitment at all. With regard to concrete objectives our interview partners talked essentially about two aspects: firstly, referring people who were interested in sport and had themselves contacted US Paralympics to local sports providers and, secondly, organising trial courses, or ‘sport samplers’, and competitions for beginners in various sports:

It's something new in the last year or two on the Alpine skiing side or the winter sports that we are trying to identify potential athletes that want to take it further than the recreation end. Is there a system in place? […] First of all, we suggest that you contact your local mountain. And basically every mountain in the States will have some way of providing an adaptive experience for them. So they'll have some kind of adaptive equipment, or a programme in their backyard. So we suggest the first thing they do is contact the ski school at their local mountain, and ask them if they have an adaptive programme, or can they provide an adaptive lesson, and start there. And usually, about ninety per cent of our resorts and mountains here do have an option to at least provide an experience right away. From there, if a person gets interested in doing more, and maybe they outgrow that programme, that's when we try to educate them with US Paralympics, or some of the programmes around, when they might have to travel an hour or two to get more lessons, or get someone who is a little bit more educated for them. But really the first thing is we ask them to contact their mountain, and start off right there […] Furthermore, we have a lot of camps; we provide learn-to-ski and race camps. We have a lot of races. We have what we call a level one race, and a level two race. So we have a lot of adaptive races throughout the country, and we have a lot of camps. So the athletes will show up to a lot of those events, and we keep a database of those athletes and hopefully try to keep in touch with them through US Paralympics, and we keep them engaged and help them stay in the sport. So I don't know if there is a perfect system in place, but I would say that camps and races throughout the States have helped develop some of those athletes. (USO3)

A coach from Alpine skiing expressed the view that there was an urgent need to catch up as far as a systematic process of talent recruitment and development was concerned and referred to his own primary objective of furthering the much needed cooperation in his sport between the organisations involved such as US Paralympics and Disability Sports USA:

[Our TID system] is not as good as it could be for sure, but we are definitely working on it […] We have to work collaboratively with other programmes such as Disability Sports USA and US Paralympics, if we want to coach the athletes at the very elite level. But the US ski team, my staff and my team has definitely

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taken an on-hands approach to working with development programmes in our country. (USC1)

9.2.2 Human Resources

Issues

1. Is coaching mainly done on a full-time employment basis or on a voluntary basis?

2. Is there a lack of qualified coaches?

3. Are programmes provided for the further training of coaches in disability sports?

Full-time / voluntary work at the coaching level

Regardless of nationality, our interview partners reported that a great part of coaching work in the area of disability sport is carried out on a voluntary basis. In many cases – if at all – it is solely the coaches of national teams that are employed on a full-time basis. Here, the experts pointed to the difference from able-bodied sports, where in their experience the introduction of full-time employment structures is further advanced. In the following we look into conspicuous differences between the countries.

Different traditions apparently exist with regard to paid coaching activities in the various Canadian sports, and there are no general rules about the payment of coaches (“The coaching structure in Canada is not a national structure for all sports. Every sport has involved independently” – CAC5). In the interviews Alpine skiing and swimming were described as exemplary in this respect: the fact that in Alpine skiing coaching activities are always paid irrespective of the age and performance of the athletes supervised (“The Alpine culture […] is that […] I am a paid coach. So regardless of what level of coach I am in Canada in Alpine, I am paid to coach whatever age group I'm coaching” – CAC5) is borrowed from the tradition of ski instructors, who are organised in the Canadian Ski Instructors’ Alliance and employed by ski schools (“So coaching evolved in Canada in Alpine as a paid role because ski instructors were a paid role through their ski school” – CAC5). In other sports such as athletics, by contrast, there has never been any competitive pressure from commercial providers (“There was never a driver that was in place to create a paid environment for those coaches” – CAC5) and so the coaching culture in athletics is a culture characterised by voluntary work, right up to the highest (elite) level. This cultural difference, moreover, has effects on the establishment of training programmes to produce qualified coaches. For as long as coaching activities are linked to financial remuneration, higher standards of training and qualifications can be demanded, along with quality controls. (“Swimming's model is much more along the lines of the Alpine model, in that a coach has to be licensed in swimming in Canada to even be on the pool deck […] so there is more control over the coaching piece” – CAC5). Last but not least, a paid structure of coaching is dependent on the financial resources which the sports federation

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has at its disposal. The national elite federation Alpine Canada, for example, is financially better off than other Canadian sports federations, not least because of its sponsors, and thus more easily able to provide funding for the payment of its coaches than other federations which attract less media attention:

It's one of the highest funded in terms of corporate funding; it is in a very good position in terms of its corporate support relative to many of the other sports. So it is kind of viewed as one of the elite sports that everybody looks to as to how they manage their programming. (CAC5)

One conspicuous difference emerged from the interviews in relation to the British athletics federation, UK Athletics. Many coaches who train athletes of national teams are not employed by the federation but act as personal coaches selected by the athletes themselves. If their work is successful (and is interpreted as such by the federation and national coaches) they receive a financial remuneration according to the team the athlete they supervise belongs to. The national coach’s freedom to decide the amount seems to be fairly large:

I don’t have to pay if I don’t want. If it is a coach that is an absolute doorknob and he comes to say, ‘I want my money’ I go like, ‘No, you’re not getting it because you’re not up to pay.’ […] They are not employed by us and they don’t get any benefits. It is more a recognition and they send an invoice […] To get that money they have to fulfil a whole slew of things. (UKC2)

An athlete spoke of arbitrary powers in this connection and voiced his anger about them in his interview:

Currently, my coach coaches three disabled athletes. All three of these athletes are going to bring home gold medals from London [i.e. the Paralympic Games in 2012]. It’s incredible because my coach still hasn’t got the credit. He had never been paid by UKA […] It’s really criminal what’s going on at the moment as far as UKA and coaches are concerned […] My coach got paid £4,000 for the whole year […] And [name of the national coach] said to him that it was like a reward for getting the athletes to the level that he got them to. My coach and I just laughed and we said, ‘Well, that’s not much of a reward; you are not valuing our work at what it’s actually worth here.’ […] This year, they want to pay him a little bit more money, but they want him to do a lot more work for the money. (UKA3)

In the athlete’s opinion the widespread underpayment of local coaches is a fact that can be observed in disability sport in particular:

It is a bigger problem in disability sport. But I believe that the same problem occurs to a lesser degree in able-bodied sport. But a lot more of the able-bodied coaches get paid annual salaries whereas the disability coaches are much more

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volunteer-based. (UKA3)

From the federation’s point of view the advantage of this system is that – when compared with the situation described above in Canadian skiing and swimming – the expenditure for UK Athletics is kept within reasonable limits. On the other hand, the national athletics head coach has no possibility at all of taking influence on an athlete’s choice of coach: “I can never tell an athlete that they have to change a coach and that they have to go to another coach” (UKC2).

Lack of qualified coaches

Several athletes across all three countries brought up the issue of the lack of qualified coaches in the interviews, reporting that not infrequently parents or even the athletes themselves took (or had to take) the initiative and play the role of coach if they wanted to ensure something that at all resembled systematic and methodical training. The following were typical comments in this respect:

Sometimes, a lot of the time, our programme is almost like athlete-led, really. I think we just need better time on snow and better coaching. (UKA7)

A lot of people are coached by their parent. They are people with a great heart, but they don’t know how to set people up. (USA7)

One development squad athlete reported that although a national coach had been assigned to him, he had rarely set eyes on her because she was alone, without the support of further co-coaches, and responsible for a large number of athletes of different performance levels. Hence, it was scarcely possible for him to undergo individualised training supervised by the national coach in person. He raised the concern that if the coach situation did not change soon, many successful athletes would go abroad:

We do have a national coach, but she's stretched for having, you know, we need a system of coaches to help out, we need, you know, the coaches jumping from the development, to the a-team, to the b-team – we need more coaches really that can be more specific to the individuals […] That is why a lot of people tend to go to America, Canada, where you’re getting coaches on a day-to-day basis […] You get the continuity of a good coach all the time. (UKA7)

A Canadian skier, the only athlete with a disability in her training group, reported that her local coaches had great expertise as far as skiing was concerned but did not show any interest in learning more about appropriate methods of training for her disability. Nor did they really understand that working with athletes with a disability meant, for example, that methods had to be adapted to the individual:

I'm the only person that they have on their team with cerebral palsy, but it’s very difficult for them to try to understand skiing outside of any kind of method that

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they already knew, right? Outside the able-bodied framework. (CAA9)

An issue that was raised several times in the interviews with athletes was that although many coaches accepted having to supervise athletes with disabilities in their training groups, they were not willing to put in any additional effort that was necessary if it deviated from their usual training routine. This, at least, was the interpretation of one athlete who spoke in her interview of unreflected comments made by her coaches which indicated that they did not value the performances of athletes with disabilities in the same way as they did those of the able-bodied athletes they trained. Moreover, they devoted most of their energy to Olympic sport:

Saying things like ‘real world cup racers’. It's like ‘Am I not a real world cup racer?’ Basically, is that what you're saying? You know? I never said that. We all thought it, we didn't say it […] That was the problem with these coaches, and you could never confront them about anything. You couldn't even have a conversation with them. (CAA9)

This athlete went on to say that the unequal treatment of Olympic and Paralympic team members also led to the fact that the special needs of the Paralympic athletes were not taken into consideration when locations for training camps were selected. As a result of the unfavourable conditions of the training camps, the increase in performance among ski racers with disabilities fell short of that of the able-bodied racers:

We often went to training camps and locations that are perfectly fine for an able- bodied team, but are very difficult for a disabled team […] For example, you are on a T-bar [lift] all day. For an able-bodied person to stand on two legs on a T-bar isn’t that difficult. For a one-legged person it is different. (CAA9)

Even among the national coaches we interviewed there was a consensus that something needed to be done about the lack of qualified coaches in the areas of both talent identification and talent development. One expert cited the example of Nordic skiing, where basic training mostly took place in inclusive settings; here, although coaches from able-bodied sport were quite ready to integrate athletes with disabilities into their training groups, they were often simply overchallenged by the necessity to adapt training methods to the particular disabilities of the athletes:

Most ski clubs that work with disabled athletes are exemplary. There aren’t any coaches who say, ‘Here comes someone with a disability. Oh no, we can’t have that.’ I’ve never seen that happen in ski clubs. The biggest problem in ski clubs is simply that the coaches aren’t a hundred per cent up to the challenge because the task is too difficult. It’s easier to do a training session with ten 15-year-olds who aren’t disabled than with two that sit in wheelchairs. (CAC1)

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There was disagreement in the study group about the question of whether more needed to be done at the grass-roots level or at the elite level. One coach expressed the view that although the expertise of the coaches working at the highest level of talent development, i.e. at the national team level, was outstanding (“Our strength lies at the national team programme level. Our Alpine team has a very solid Paralympic programme; our athletics programme has a very solid Paralympic programme. You can go on and on to other programmes” – CAC5), the level of talent recruitment and initial development showed certain weaknesses:

Where we are weak is at the recruitment level and the grass-roots entry level; there’s very little knowledge and experience about the disabled athletes, so that’s where we’re lacking; we don’t have coaches that are knowledgeable to take on working with disabled athletes. They are scared to do it. So that's where the system as a whole is weak is at the development level. The performance level is fine. (CAC5)

Another interview partner took the exact opposite position, arguing as follows: what has to be achieved in one way or another at the initial stage of training in several sports is that athletes with disabilities “join in” in large training groups, without individualised training schedules having to be drawn up that are adapted to their specific disabilities. And the higher the level of performance, the greater a problem this becomes. This view was held by the majority of the interview partners irrespective of nationality and sport, as exemplified by the following quotations from the areas of Nordic skiing and athletics:

At the beginning it’s no great problem to find coaches who go skiing with an athlete all winter. Later, in the second or third year, when the athletes have got to the point where they know more than the coach, there’s a problem. That’s why it’s important we train coaches to work with disabled athletes. But that’s exactly the main problem we have in Canada at the moment. There are maybe eight or ten coaches in the whole of Canada who I would say are able to work with disabled athletes. (CAC1)

A lot of our athletes are thrown into mass training groups and their performance needs aren't being individually identified […] the coach is not used to having an athlete who's able to be on the high-performance programme. And it's kind of exceeding their level of competence. And the other piece is that the coach might not just take the whole Paralympic thing seriously enough. (CAC4)

Anything is possible at the grass-roots level […] but the higher you come, it isn’t possible. And the higher you come, the harder it is […] I would say there has been a big move within swimming over the last ten years that we have a club accreditation programme so that all the clubs have got to say, ‘Yes, we have performed certain requirements, regulations, etc.’ Now during that time there

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has been a big push to make sure that everybody that goes on the pool side to teach is qualified. (UKC4)

The lack of expertise in identifying talent, as well as the lack of seriousness in handling the issue of high-performance disability sport on the part of coaches from able-bodied sports, has led to the circumstance that quite a number of potential national team members are not identified and thus lost to the system:

I had a coach last week who just admitted that he probably hadn't been taking his athlete's performance potential seriously enough and his athlete was getting frustrated because we weren't looking at her for the world championships coming up and she was wondering why. So I went and met with them last Friday on my way to Toronto, and I clearly explained that we look at performance potential. (CAC4)

Not only athletes and coaches but also the officials we interviewed predominantly agreed that in comparison with able-bodied sport there was a marked shortage of qualified coaches across countries and across sports. The lack of any special knowledge about disabilities was particularly manifest in the coaching of athletes with severe multiple disabilities:

I think most athletes are trained by someone who's been their PE teacher, their mum, their dad, that sort of thing […] But the greater the disability somebody has, the less appropriate the training might be, or the less understanding there seems to be of their needs as athletes […] There’s nothing out there that says, ‘I'm qualified as an expert coach of people with severe physical disability in sport.’ (UKO5)

You know, sometimes you just get a parent out helping, sometimes you just get an athlete that's trying to coach, too, and you know that doesn't work. So there’s definitely room for us to have an increase in the number of coaches. (CAO3)

In future, a Canadian official would like to take advantage of the fact that there are large numbers of qualified coaches in able-bodied sports who might be approached, motivated and, by means of appropriate training, qualified to work in disability sport. In doing so, he would like to make use of their specific expertise in their sport since in his view this expertise is indispensable when working with elite athletes with disabilities at the national team level. Coaches who might have some expertise in training athletes with a disability but none in a particular sport have fewer advantages for coaching in high-performance sport:

The coaches are out there on the able-bodied side; it’s that we haven’t been able to educate or bring enough of them over to also work with the Paralympians. So I think the coaches exist in Canada; it's that we definitely have a significant lack of coaches working in Paralympic sport right now, so that's the challenge. I mean, what we’ll be working with our coaching association over the coming years is, we’re

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prioritising to target people who already have the sport expertise, so people who are already coaches in the able-bodied programme, and trying to educate them and bring them over to the Paralympic side. We think that’s capturing those sport-specific skills that we think are the most important; we’re not as focused on people who have disability-specific knowledge but no sport technical skills. We don’t feel that is the best basis to go forward. There’s a role, obviously; the disability knowledge is important at the first contact and recruitment of getting people involved. But as we go further up the system, it’s obviously the sport- technical knowledge that is most important, and we feel we can educate people about the disability adaptations or the other factors around Paralympic sport – that’s relatively easy to pass on and to share. (CAO6)

A British official raised her concern in this regard that in future many coaches working exclusively in Olympic sports up to present might decide to coach Paralympic sports, too. Paralympic sport was in her view a less attractive field of activity in comparison since work (and success) in the Olympic domain bestowed much greater prestige on coaches:

I think in Paralympic sports it’s sometimes difficult to attract the better coaches. I think that’s a challenge that we have. So sometimes we have to work harder on our coach education with the coaches that we’ve got […] If we had a job, we wouldn’t get an influx of applications unless somebody really wanted to work in Paralympic sport. I think it’s perceived as a risk […] a risk in moving from able- bodied swimming to Paralympic swimming […] I think it's like kind of a bit of a stigma attached to moving across from Olympic to Paralympic. (UKO7)

A US-American athlete argued in a similar fashion and pointed to the very different kind of prestige attached to coaching in able-bodied sport compared with the recognition given to coaches in disability sport:

Working on the US Adaptive Ski Team is not nearly as prestigious as working on the US Ski Team [i.e. the (able-bodied) national skiing team]. I mean, [it is a] totally different level! (USA7)

In conclusion, it must be noted that wheelchair basketball was the only sport whose experts did not explicitly refer to a shortage of qualified coaches in their interviews. According to a Canadian coach, the reason for this sport being an exception lies in its popularity in large sectors of the population. In all three countries wheelchair basketball ranks as one of the best-known disability sports:

For us, it isn’t hard to find coaches. Just because wheelchair basketball is very popular in the disabled world. There are a lot of club teams in Canada and along with a lot of club teams come all the individual coaches and you just think that of all the coaches that are out there, some of them, you know, want to raise their

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level to deliver a national team programme curriculum – also for the chance of maybe even making the team and to come along as an assistant coach. (CAC3)

On the athletes’ side there was only one case in all the interviews where complete satisfaction was expressed with the qualifications of the national coaching team:

The coaching situation has been great over the last year. This will be going into the fifth year, so since Torino it’s been phenomenal. We had a very good coach in Torino, but she was only one person and you can't do so much if you're just one person, right? So since then we’ve had more coaches and more diversity and they’re all very much qualified, so it’s been great. (CAA7)

General / specialised training for coaches

All the experts we interviewed across all sports agreed that there was an urgent need to improve both the general and the specialised training of coaches working in disability sport. There are very few (if any) sections of the general training curricula for coaches in several federations that relate specifically to disability sport.

Within the UK Athletics coaching levels, they don’t cover anything on disability. So – they mention a little bit about it. Apparently, we come under the title of ‘special populations’. And basically we get five minutes where they say, ‘And there’s this group of people called ‘disabled people’, but you don’t need to know anything about them because they don’t do sport anyway.’ That's basically the bottom line. And so a lot of coaches are very scared of disabled people. They don’t know how to react; they don’t know what to do about it. (UKA1)

In order to remedy the lack of disability-specific components in coach training, concepts were developed in the USA for the specialised training of coaches in the sport of wheelchair basketball. However, much to the regret of one of our interview partners, the implementation of this scheme ultimately came to nothing due to financial constraints – meaning that general and specialised training were now based, according to this basketball coach, on the principle of learning by doing:

We just put together a high-performance plan that takes us through 2014 and we’ve addressed a coaches’ development pipeline. Again, it’s going to be funding dependent. And right now, particularly in women’s basketball, there is a lack of qualified female coaches, without question […] There is no pathway. Most of our coaches are coming out of the collegiate league that we have […] I think where coaches are learning is just in the day-to-day local areas where they are being almost self-taught, you know? My son’s been an assistant coach with the local programme and one of the parents […] They’ve learned over eight years, nine years of participating. (USC3)

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Incorporating disability sport-specific contents into the curricula of general coach training was of great importance in the experts’ view, not least because several sports in the three countries had no tradition of separate sports clubs for people with a disability. As a consequence, if they wished to take up a sport, people with disabilities had no alternative but to join a mainstream sports club. For this reason, the experts noted, it was essential for coaches from the area of able-bodied sports to be trained to work in inclusive settings as well. Several British athletics clubs were already on the right path, it was said:

We’ve still got a very long way to go, because there are still clubs that still aren’t fully ready to take disabled athletes on. But they’re getting better and, as I said, awareness is being made all the time because there’s a lot more training courses for our coaches so they can be more adaptable, more inclusive. (UKA5)

In the interviews, however, there were indications that putting a new coach training strategy into practice that took account of disability sport sometimes met with opposition on the part of coaches with many years of practice. One athlete reported, for example, that although senior officials of UK Athletics had campaigned vigorously to improve the training system and had even launched a coaching offensive based on a successful Canadian model, difficulties arose since by no means all coaches were convinced of the planned changes and thus unwilling to support the new system:

Basically what’s happened now is they’ve taken that model of coach education [from Canada] and tried to apply it to Britain. But the problem is that they haven’t got the backing of the other coaches in the sport […] [The national coach] has got a good idea, and brought in the right people to make this idea work, but he’s not getting on the side with the people who the programme is designed to help […] So the coaches who are here at the moment, they aren’t really prepared to change, because for a lot of them, the old system works for them. (UKA1)

In the following, examples of good practice from Canada are described which have come about most of all thanks to the hard work of individuals. A coach working in Nordic skiing reported that in the previous three years he had written an appendix for each chapter of a manual issued by the (integrated) skiing federation with explanations and instructions for training with athletes with disabilities. It was a sign of progress, he said, that in the exam to qualify for a coaching licence questions were now asked about aspects of disability sport. Young coaches who had taken the exam in the last two years were now prepared for work with athletes with a disability since they “know from their training what to do when they have a disabled athlete [in their training group]” (CAC2). That many qualified coaches were not able to use their knowledge in practice because there were no athletes with disabilities in their sports clubs or ski clubs was a problem that our interview partner tried to solve in the following way:

We’ve also invited coaches [from able-bodied sport] to our ‘open days’ [at which

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interested individuals are introduced to the sport] […] Recently in Ontario fifteen coaches were prepared to sit down for a weekend and learn something about disability sport. They wanted to see if they were suited to working with athletes with a disability or not. (CAC2)

Other Canadian federations were undergoing similar processes of change, and a common factor in this reorientation seemed to be that the initiative was often taken by national coaches working in Paralympic sports. In the following, the methods of a swimming coach are described, for example, who developed a training course to certify “Para-swimming officials” so that officials working in the able-bodied area of the sport were enabled to identify talented children and adolescents and report them to the coaches responsible:

We’ve established a national Para-swimming official training programme, so more and more officials around the country are becoming certified as Para- swimming officials. But that becomes a huge recruitment tool for us in the sense that you’ve got the swimming officials on the book deck at these meets every weekend and, all of a sudden, they’re seeing and identifying kids […] and that’s how we’re starting to see kids pop into the system because there are officials and the officials are better educated, the coaches are becoming better educated and that’s what we’re doing. (CAC1)

This swimming coach, furthermore, has written a manual for coaches – also available online – containing information on individual types of disability along with appropriate training methods in order to provide coaches and instructors from able-bodied sports with tools and suggestions as to which training methods and techniques they can use with athletes according to their particular disability:

And the other interesting thing we’ve done is that we’ve developed what we call a ‘coaches’ handbook’. We’ve taken all of [name of a coach]’s technical mumbo- jumbo and I’ve rewritten a lot of it and some other people have rewritten bits and pieces of it, where we’ve taken the technical jargon and stuff and we put it into what we call ‘coach speak’, where it’s putting the terms that coaches understand. And it’s basically – a lot of it’s – just bulleted stuff into six to ten word bites. So if a coach has an athlete with cerebral palsy, the coach will be able to get the cerebral palsy section of the Coaches’ Handbook and be able to get some basic information about ‘What does a CP hemi [i.e. hemiplegic] do? What does a CP diplegic do?’ And all of a sudden, they’re able to have a standard; they are no experts but they at least have a standard working knowledge of cerebral palsy and head injuries, let’s say. So that’s the group that would go together. So all of a sudden we’ve started developing tools […] We’ll have our online coaching video library resource online, where there’s gonna be a searchable video clip database where you would be able to go in and say, ‘All right, I’m looking for CP

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backstroke turns’. (CAC2)

The aim is to remove the anxieties or inhibitions of coaches who have previously worked only in able-bodied sport when they train athletes with disabilities:

So we’re developing these coaching resources so that our coaches in the field have the ability to feel more comfortable and we’re all in belief that the coaches become more comfortable with an understanding of disability and disability swimming, they’re gonna start coaching the way they need to coach and not be afraid like, ‘I don’t know how to coach a kid.’ I’ll say, ‘Well, you do know how to coach a kid, you just don’t understand CP or you don’t understand amputees or you don’t understand spinal cord injuries. (CAC1)

This very issue of the inhibition of able-bodied sports coaches when having to train athletes with a disability was raised by many experts in the interviews across all sports. Since there were no athletes with a disability in their training groups, it was important to somehow create situations in which coaches came together with athletes with disabilities. An Alpine skiing coach described how a “few tricks” were used to “entice” coaches to trial training sessions so that they could experience children and adolescents with disabilities at close hand for the first time:

In Alpine skiing, a coach has to be licensed every year. And every year they have to do many professional development education credits in order to get their licence. So what we did is we said, ‘If you are a coach in an able-bodied club, and you come and spend a day with us, in our disability recruitment programme, we’ll give you two professional development credits toward your licence for free. You don’t have to pay to come, just show up. So we’ve actually had a number of coaches who have come to take advantage of the professional development opportunity and, in turn, they have in one day, they’re going, ‘You know, coaching these disabled kids isn't that hard.’ So now a lot of the entry-level clubs in the country are starting to invite kids with disabilities to join their clubs because they find that it’s easier to integrate them into the clubs than they originally thought it might be. (CAC5)

The officials, too, emphasised that both the general and specialised training of coaches was – or at least ought to be – a key responsibility of the federations in order to recruit new coaches for Paralympic sport:

Recruiting additional coaches is absolutely a key priority, and it ties directly to the athlete recruitment, right? It does us no good to bring in thousands of new athletes if we don’t have anybody to coach them. So I think for me, the two go hand in hand, that athlete and coach recruitment are a couple of our biggest priorities going forward. (CAO7)

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Most of the experts we interviewed, irrespective of country or sport, stressed that, as far as training was concerned, there ought to be no explicit separation either between disability and non-disability sports or between Paralympic and Olympic sports. This view was based on the experience of officials that most of the coaches working in Paralympic sport originally came from the sphere of able-bodied sport. This is exemplified by the following comments made in the interviews:

Well, so our coaches at the national team level go through the same certification process as I do, and there is – for instance next week there is a Canadian-wide Alpine skiing coaching summit, and all coaches are invited to it and our entire staff will be there, as well as the able-bodied staff. So that is integration. Currently the staff that is coaching the World Cup team comes from the able- bodied side, originally coaching able-bodied athletes. So we know a lot of people on the able-bodied side. There is a lot of integration just in terms of business, staff, friendships, organising camps together […] None of the existing coaches that are here are from the Para-side. They were all educated as able-body coaches. In my mind there is no reason why able-body coaches cannot coach Paras. The actual expertise and education comes from high-level coaching, so it doesn’t matter to me if you are a Para Alpine coach that has been coaching at little level – you know, at a club level or beginner level for five years or ten, fifteen years – or you have a World Cup coach from able-body that has been coaching for ten years. That able-body coach is probably at the high-level and is going to be able to offer more inside information than the Para coach that has only ever worked with beginners. (CAO3)

We do have organisations like the Coaching Association of Canada who mandates the certification of all the coaches, but they look at it a different way. The question is: Do you integrate the coaching education or not? If you want to be a swimming coach on the able-bodied side, go into this course. And there is a different course for someone for the Para. But the courses shouldn’t be that different […] There are coaches on the able-bodied side who are good coaches to realise that coaching an athlete with a disability really isn’t that different. There are a few small things, but not really at the high-performance level. (CAO7)

Occasionally we’ll have one [coach] from a disability swimming background, but that’s definitely becoming less and less. So at the World Championships, we had none who were from a disability swimming background. They were all from just a general swimming background […] I think it’s more about swimming and them adapting things to suit your athletes rather than two separate coaching pathways, I don’t know if that is necessary. (UKO6)

At the elite level of British wheelchair basketball the majority of coaches are recruited from

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the pool of former players. But, in addition, it is often the case that coaches come from able- bodied basketball:

Some of them come from able-bodied […] I think some of the advanced coaches that are involved with wheelchair will come from able-bodied. The majority are ex-players […] They’re the people who’ve played the game and then will sort of carry onward what they were doing. (UKO4)

Officials of the (integrative) British athletics federation likewise point out that in principle no difference ought to be made in the federation between Olympic and Paralympic sport with the regard to the training of coaches. According to the athletics experts, the only adjustments that need to be made in training methods are those connected with throwing techniques, which are performed in a sitting position, and with wheelchair racing (“Only where that differs is in seating throws and in wheelchair – UKO2):

We have a Strategic Head of Coaching. He runs the coaching and coaching development side of things. And when there are any coaching developments and initiatives ongoing, they are equal in Paralympic and Olympic coaching. Apart from wheelchair racing, there are no differences, as far as we’re concerned, between the knowledge that you need to coach an Olympic athlete or a Paralympic athlete. (UKO3)

Officials of the British swimming federation have published a brochure – in a similar fashion to the manual compiled by the Canadian skiing coach mentioned above – which serves as a short coaching guide for training athletes with disabilities in swimming:

Four pages or six pages and you could just have a flick through. So even if somebody wasn’t quite ready [to coach an athlete with a disability], they could get some more information about how they could coach an athlete with an impairment, so that’s kind of something to help the coaches. (UKO3)

A US-American official of the National Disability Sport Organisation pointed out in his interview that in the course of time the target group that had been envisaged for coaching in disability sport had changed. Whereas in the past the focus had been on people who had experience of working with individuals with a disability but had no sports background, now the attempt was made to recruit preferably coaches from the sphere of able-bodied sport, who brought with them the necessary expertise in (high-performance) sport:

Twenty, twenty-five years ago, what we found was that we usually had someone who was interested in disability and we were trying to train them to be coaches in that sport. And that didn’t work very well. And what we are finding now is that if we can identify trained coaches in the sport, it is much easier to teach them the adaptations for the disability than the other way around. (USO1)

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A Canadian expert, a member of the Canadian Paralympic Committee, emphasised that it was important to develop a robust strategy for recruiting and training coaches for disability sport. Coaches from able-bodied sport must be offered clear(er) incentives to work in the Paralympic sphere such as the opportunity of faster promotion than in Olympic sport and thus the earlier chance of working at the international level:

We’re looking to implement coaching awards and coaching bursaries and coach membership programmes, some of these things, to show that if we can provide additional professional development to the coach, we can get them more international competition opportunities earlier in their career – that we can build a case as to why to get involved in Paralympic sport. I think some of the strategies have struggled in the past where they didn’t really provide incentives or benefits. It was almost more of a guilt trip to the coach that, ‘Oh, you should be involved in Paralympic sport because it’s a good thing to do.’ That hasn’t proven very effective in our opinion, so we’re looking at more: What are the services that we can deliver to potential coaches in order to entice them into working in Paralympic sport? – and basically have a recruitment strategy for coaches just as we have one for athletes. […] We want to make sure that the coach understands or can see what the benefits are as to why he or she should get involved on the Paralympic side. (CAO7)

9.2.3 Financial resources

Issues

1. What financial resources are available at the grass-roots level?

2. What financial resources are available at the development/elite level?

Most of the officials and coaches we interviewed, irrespective of country and sport, stressed that one of the key aims of Paralympic sport – namely to induce more people with disabilities to take up sport at the grass-roots level in order to have a larger pool of athletes from which choose when seeking new talent – could only be achieved if more financial resources were allocated to this area. Especially the Canadian and British experts we interviewed lamented the fact that at the moment all demands for more funds in this area were not being met since a large part of the resources available, they claimed, was being channelled into the elite development of national or federation squad athletes. For talent development at the grass- roots level, by contrast, budgeting was comparatively limited. This is exemplified in the following comment made by a British athletics official in her interview:

At grass-roots there are grants and funds and things that you can tap into but there is not a lot of money around getting things started […] The money doesn’t

go into people who are coming into the sport. It’s all strange but, I mean, we’re back

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to sports politics again and money being tied to medals, and I fear that we won’t ever get much away from that, you know, where the big serious money is. (UKO7)

A Canadian athlete reported that in the early years of his sporting career he had received no financial backing whatsoever from either the federation or any other funding agency. This was why most of his team colleagues, he suggested, came from families with the right socio- economic background:

For my birthday presents and my Christmas presents I asked for money and I didn’t ask for presents because I paid for everything [in my sport] […] In general, yes, absolutely, it'’ people whose families have better economic situations. There is the exception to the rule – there is one specifically I think of who came from a very poor family who has had success. That’s the exception to the rule, for sure. (CAA7)

Confirming this athlete’s comment, a Canadian official came to the conclusion that the present allocation of funding (i.e. relatively large amounts of money going into high- performance sport and relatively small amounts into grass-roots sport) needed to be reversed in the long term.

It’s a continuum for certain, and it might just be something like 65 per cent needs to be devoted to grass-roots and 35 for the high-performance – because we’ve been doing the high-performance thing a little bit longer. But it goes without saying that eventually those athletes get older, they retire, and they get less effective at their sport; and if there is no one coming up to replace them – then that’s it! Your entire system will disappear. (CAO6)

In the following a number of representative comments made by our interview partners are quoted with regard, first of all, to current sources of funding for sport at the grass-roots level and afterwards to current sources of funding for sport at the development/elite level.

Financial resources at the grass-roots level

Both in the UK and in Canada grass-roots sport receives money above all from sponsors. In Canada, for example, a programme for training physical education teachers in Paralympic sports is sponsored by an oil company (“There’s a fuel company here called Petrol Canada and they work with our education programme, so there’s a grass-roots programme that goes into the schools to help the teachers with lesson plans that have Paralympic sport in them” – CAO6). Sponsorship money from a pharmaceutical company was used, moreover, to compile a brochure for health sector facilities such as rehabilitation centres. The brochure contains brief descriptions of Paralympic sports, accompanied by illustrations, in order, for example, to make sporting activities appeal to children (“Same thing with one of our pharmaceutical companies. They sponsored a book for us to use in the healthcare setting in the rehab

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facilities, so that it can show the kids pictures and do descriptions of the sports. It's not high- performance based” – CAO6).

The Office of Disability Issues, a Canadian government agency whose aim is to promote inclusion in Canadian society, was named in the interviews as a further sponsor of disability sport at the grass-roots level in Canada (“There’s another government office but different than Sport Canada called the ‘Office of Disability Issues’. And we get some money from there” –

CAO6).57 It was also reported that in the UK, too, the financial resources available for grass- roots sport were quite limited in comparison with other areas of sport.

It is conspicuous that our US-American interview partners revealed themselves to be much less self-critical than their British and Canadian counterparts. The US-American experts emphasised that in the USA substantial funding was channelled into grass-roots sports generally (“We have significant resources that go into our grass-roots level” – USO4). At the same time, though, it was important that sports clubs at this level should by no means rely on financial backing from the US Olympic Committee (USOC) for their existence:

We want the sport clubs to be self-sufficient and be designed for a long period of time. If the US Olympic Committee was funding all of these sport clubs, the local community would become dependent upon that funding. And as we continue to grow, it would be difficult to fund all of these organisations, and then we would quit funding them. (USO4)

Further, it became clear in the interview that no costs were spared on the part of the US- American government in supporting grass-level sports for army veterans:

We have received significant funding from our federal government to support military programmes, and so we have a presence in all of the major military rehab facilities. We have staff that goes in and works with the physical therapists in introducing adaptive sport or disability sport to these service members when they are going through their rehabilitation in the hospital, so that we are exposing them to sport right away – which goes back to one of my earlier comments that most everyone can benefit from sport participation. (USO4)

Financial resources at the development/elite level

In Canada and the UK the financial resources available for sport at the higher performance levels tend to be greater than is the case in the USA, where the tradition of government funding for sport does not exist in the same way. In the following we present the different funding sources of the national sports federations in the three countries.

57 See http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/disability_issues/mandate/index.shtml (retrieved 13.12.2012).

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Canada

Table 14 Funding sources of Canadian NGBs for development/elite sport

Canadian Government

Own the Podium (OTP)

Sponsoring

Canadian sports federations profit from government funding for sport, for which the Own the Podium programme was initiated. Depending on the number of athletes who show medal- winning potential in a season’s highlight events (such as world championships and/or the Paralympic Games), grants are allocated to the national sports federations which are earmarked for specific purposes and may be used solely for the support of elite sport, as one official explained:

For ‘Own the Podium’, the money goes directly to the national governing body. So it’s not money to the athletes, but it can pay for coach salaries; it can pay for a pre-game staging camp overseas; it could pay for sending more sport science support to the World Championships. The sports identify their priorities, and then the experts kind of access what will make the biggest difference getting ready for the games. (CAO7)

A national coach criticised the fact that his decision-making powers over how to spend the money he received from the Own the Podium programme were extremely limited since a fixed budget determined all items of spending in advance:

My core funding from Sport Canada is about 420,000 dollars. And then my OTP portion, which is the portion that could disappear at any moment, is about 950,000. Out of those 950,000 dollars, every single penny of that is directed money. I have no sort of latitude with it, so when I go through the process in the fall they will require me to produce a budget with line items and dollar figures on each line item. And then they go through all the line items and they decide; they ask you to raise them high, medium and low, and then basically at the end go, ‘Ok this is what we’re going to do.’ (CAC1)

He also voiced his criticism of the share of the budget allocated to high-performance sport (70 per cent) and the share allocated to the development level of sport (30 per cent), proportions which were fixed in advance and which left no room at all for transferring or re-allocating money. Apart from the state funding they receive, the sports federations also make use of sponsorship acquisition to finance their high-performance divisions.

Canada also has a programme of direct financial support for athletes. Accountable to Sport

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Canada, the Athlete Assistance Programme (AAP) serves Olympic and Paralympic sports in equal measures and provides support amounting to $1,500 per month for senior-level athletes and $900 per month for development athletes tax free (figures in effect at the time of the interviews). In addition, (amateur) athletes can apply for financial support to the Canadian Athletes Now Fund, a non-profit, fund-raising organisation which provides grants of up to $12,000 per annum. Selected athletes also receive support from their provincial government (such as the Government of Quebec).

Table 15 Funding sources of elite Canadian athletes (as of 2010)

Athlete Assistance Programme (AAP), taking Nordic skiing as an example

2010: 11 national squad athletes in the Paralympic team

7 senior athletes

(A-team)

$18,000 per year (approx. €13,850)

$1,500 per month (approx. €1,160)

4 junior athletes

(development)

$10,800 per year (approx. €8,320)

$900 per month (approx. €692)

Canadian Athletes Now Fund – up to $12,000 per year

Funding from provincial governments (e.g. Quebec Government – up to $10,000 per year)

Sponsoring

While Olympic athletes are awarded cash prizes by the Canadian Olympic Committee for winning medals, the Canadian Paralympic Committee does not have the financial resources at its disposal to reward its athletes with prize money. One official commented:

The money-for-medals scheme was fully funded by the Canadian Olympic Committee. The Canadian Paralympic Committee does not have the same kind of financial resources to be able to do that. So the Olympians were cut a check for their medals and the Paralympians were not provided with anything. (CAO2)

A coach reported that the overall funding made available for Paralympic sport in the four years preceding the Vancouver Games in 2010 was 80 per cent of that channelled into Olympic sport. He stressed that the smaller budget was “not necessarily the biggest problem”; it was now important, though, that the overall sum was not reduced after the Games (“And it looks fine – as though we’ll be getting the same sum we got in the 2006-2010 cycle until 2014”

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– CAC1). One coach highlighted the tremendous development of Paralympic sport in the last few years. And this development was not yet over, she added; in the coming years Paralympic sport would gradually draw closer to the level of Olympic sport. In her experience Paralympic athletes had become very aware of this positive development:

The thing is that they recognise the evolution of the sport; it has improved so much in the last five, six, seven, years. I mean, with time hopefully we get to a place where they get money. If it’s going to be by London or if it’s going to be by Sochi, I don’t know, but they already – like, they are so far ahead of where they were just four years ago. And I think that they [i.e. Paralympic athletes] understand it is a process. None of our athletes would complain. I mean everybody always wants more money. It would be great to have the exact same agreements and benefits as the able-bodied does, but the COC and the CPC are different. (CAO1)

It is, in fact, conspicuous that the criticism of Canadian athletes about the (not very large) difference in the financial support given to Olympic and Paralympic athletes is fairly restrained (in comparison with their US-American counterparts):

I would say not 100 per cent equal, but not far from what the able-bodied are getting. I’m sure we’re one of the lucky countries to be like this – but, yeah, we get a lot of stuff, really close to what the able bodies are getting, for sure. Only small things are different. They try to say that it’s equal, but it’s in the recognition, I would say, more than anything, you know. There’s prize money when you win an Olympic medal; there's no prize money when you win a Paralympic medal. It’s not so big a difference, but there is a difference. (CAA2)

It does not have quite the financial size from my understanding. So they cannot put out that offer – and plus the Canadian Olympic team usually has a medal quota of about 20 medals while we have 50 to 70 medals. So again the Canadian Paralympic Committee would need to shell out a lot more of money than the Olympic Committee. (CAA3)

Several of the Canadian national team members we interviewed received financial backing from personal sponsors, and it was repeatedly pointed out in the interviews that disability sport had enjoyed increasing popularity in Canada after the 2010 Paralympic Games in Vancouver. As a result, many companies had taken an interest in sponsoring not only Olympic athletes, as they had done before, but also – and especially – Paralympic athletes:

There is half of the team maybe that has one personal sponsor. And the other half of the team doesn’t have any. [Having a personal sponsor] is really normal in Canada, and that’s only because of Vancouver and 2010, which was very helpful for us that way. (And I don’t think that now after Vancouver somebody will lose a

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sponsor) because the vibe in Vancouver is so great still from the Olympics and so people really want to support amateur athletes. And my team is very well set up and very organised and prepared for those sorts of things. Amongst my team, some people will probably lose a sponsor but they will probably be replaced by another one. (CAA7)

However, the athletes noted that, as a rule, it was necessary to market themselves in order to acquire sponsors as companies rarely approached federations of their own accord. And being able to promote themselves depended very much on their personality – and this was not a talent given to everyone in the same measure:

It’s pretty much self-promotion […] The team does help a little bit in terms of personal sponsors, but largely it is self-promotion. (CAA7)

It’s a kind of combination of all. I went out and got them [i.e. sponsors] myself. Otherwise, there were programmes that the companies themselves put on, and they went to the sports organisation, the national governing body or Sport Canada and said, ‘Okay, we want certain athletes from this part of Canada. Which athletes would you recommend?’ And sometimes it’s as simple as just applying to one of those sponsorships […] Often the companies have a range of athletes, and they like to have the male, the female, and the Paralympic. Most companies within Canada are pretty good with that. There are certain sponsorships that only sponsor Olympic athletes, but other companies are good with sponsoring both. (CAA2)

Although top Canadian athletes profit from the state’s funding of sport, it is clear from the interviews that government grants scarcely suffice to cover the cost of living. Consequently, athletes are forced to either try and find a sponsor or work alongside their training. Various interview partners mentioned in this respect the different financial backing of Olympic and Paralympic athletes:

At the fundamental support by Sport Canada, it’s completely equitable. What an Olympic athlete receives for support money is exactly what a Paralympic athlete receives for support money. But in terms of sponsorships and opportunities above and beyond government funding, the Olympic athletes have far more opportunity than the Paralympic athletes. (CAC5)

It’s a question of needs versus availability of resources. So, someone like myself, who is 38 years old and has 1.4 million dollars of mortgages, I must work. But if I am an eighteen-year-old student, I may be able to live on 900 dollars a month […] It depends on age, and it depends on needs, and it depends on what sport you’re doing. But in general, disability sport, or sport in Canada, is not supported […] Some athletes are at or below poverty level. So many times, you’d be better off

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[…] figuring out a way to make money than to beg for money. (CAA1)

A lot of athletes still work in jobs, part-time or full-time, in order to pay for their sport […] I’ve never heard of an able-bodied Alpine skier who had a job at the same time as being on the national team. Never. Never. (CAA5)

I can survive fairly very comfortably with that, with the addition of my sponsorship money, but there are some who live entirely on that, and that’s nearly impossible to do, especially in Vancouver. (CAA7)

For me, it’s fine because I’m tier two, so most of it is paid for, but I know a lot of the young kids coming in. They’re finding it really hard, for instance, for them to go to US nationals: they had to pay their own flight and hotel, and the hotel that the officials decided to stay at was a Hilton, so it was quite expensive for them. I know there’s a struggle that way. (CAA4)

The UK

In the UK both the elite sports federations and national squad athletes personally receive financial backing from the World-Class Performance Programme for Olympic and Paralympic Athletes. The National Lottery is the mainstay of this programme of sports funding.

Table 16 Funding of British NGBs for high-peformance sport (as of 2011)

Lottery funding from UK Sport

NGB funding per national squad athlete at podium level

(A team)

£55,000 per year (approx.

€65,.477) NGB funding per athlete at development level

(talent squad)

£30,000 per year (approx.

€35,713)

Athletes in the UK receive direct financial support through the Athlete Personal Award (APA) programme, which treats Olympic and Paralympic athletes alike. The maximum amounts of funding for the different categories of athletes are shown in Table 17. It must be added that in the UK the same performance bonuses and prize money are awarded to top athletes in Olympic as well as Paralympic sports.

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Table 17 Funding sources for British national squad athletes (in 2011)

Individual athlete support:

Athlete Personal Award (APA)

Category A – £26,924 per year (approx. €32,000)

Category B – £20,194 per year (approx. € 24.000)

Category C – £13,462 per year (approx. € 16.000)

Individual performance bonus

It became apparent in the interviews that the equal treatment of Olympic and Paralympic athletes regarding financial support measures was a key issue among the interview partners of all three groups. Several of them hypothesised that this “same-to-same approach” was unique worldwide:

I think the equity is a very, very big thing in Britain, you know – that there would be an outcry if individuals who are Paralympic gold medallists were not receiving the support that an Olympic athlete was. They are paid well, and they are supported. I mean, all our Scottish athletes have access to the Scottish Institute of Sport and they could get everything they need. If they have a twinge in their muscles, then they go to the physio within the area institute for the Scottish Institute of Sport – I mean, it’s all there for them. They are definitely supported to the maximum. (UKA7)

A number of interview partners considered that the UK probably offered the best conditions internationally as far as the funding of Paralympic sport was concerned. This must be seen, though, against the backdrop of the 2012 Paralympics in London, which were taking place at the time of the interview study. However, the experts were not agreed on how sustainable and viable the present model was for the future:

Yes, currently, British athletes are probably the best-paid Paralympic athletes in the world […] But after London the system will crash and we’ll have to get rid of people because we can’t afford to pay them. The level of funding that we are putting into sports now isn’t sustainable […] After London, the system will have to have a MASSIVE rethink […] Sport has never been any good at long-term planning, basically because of the funding – the way the funding works. Funding is reviewed every 12 months. I can’t put in a long-term future plan if I don’t know what my funding’s gonna be over the next four years […] If I were a coach or official, I would want to be in a situation where I knew that for the next 10 years, I would have a guaranteed funding source from somewhere, so I can concentrate on building a really good strong team […] Instead we have a system that is very

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knee-jerk, very reactionary to whatever is going on around it. And consequently, it’s not very stable. (UKA1)

On the other hand, it was claimed on the part of the officials that everything was being done to guarantee planning certainty for the future. Furthermore, the “same-to-same approach” described above would remain in existence. The fact that the overall budget would be reduced after the London Games was a natural process analogous to previous Games held in other countries:

I mean, you can just look at Sydney, Athens and Barcelona – look at those nations, you know. Beijing, the money's gonna be slashed. We all know that. There’s no illusion. We know we’ve been really fortunate; we were funded before the recession kicked in. If the recession had kicked, our funding would have been a lot different than it is now. So we’ve been fortunate; timing was good for us. (UKO3)

The USA

There were indications in the interviews that US-American athletes were in a less comfortable position with regard to the financial backing of their sporting activities. Our interview partners attributed the cause of this disparity primarily to the fact that in the USA – in contrast to Canada and the UK – there was no state funding for sport:

I think a lot of it has to do with how the governments, for the most part, approach or support people with physical disabilities and things such as that. But in general, in the US, people with physical disabilities who participate in sports really are not different than those who are the Olympic athletes. It is difficult for the Olympic athletes to receive any governmental financial assistance from the government, and the Paralympians are essentially no different than that. That’s not the case in the majority of other countries. The amount of money that their governmental agencies are providing for Olympic level training and Paralympic level training and competition is, statistically, at least from what we see, significantly greater than what the US receives in those kinds of things. I mean, all of the money for US athletes comes from the corporate side, or from private donors. And that’s very different than in many other countries, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the situation in Germany is: that it’s pretty much government funded. (USO6)

The USA is different from every single country. We don’t get paid. We have to pay! Our sports organisations are privately funded. So unlike any other country, we have to pay to be in these teams in the United States. (USA4)

It’s harder to find private funding when other countries are providing government funding. It’s easier for them to find and produce athletes, because it

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really comes down to money, and supporting these athletes so that they have the right equipment, have the right coaches, do the right things, and provide the service. […] I think that whichever countries can have that financial support from the government is going to benefit the most. (USO3)

As independent and financially self-sufficient organisations, the US Olympic Committee (USOC) and US Paralympics rely uniquely on sponsoring from business and industry, as well as on donations from private individuals. In contrast to the other two countries we examined, there is no state funding that goes, for example, into disability sports organisations to support recreational and sport-for-all activities at the grass-roots level. According to the experts we interviewed, there was also a huge difference between the financial resources available for Olympic sport on the one hand and those for Paralympic sport on the other ($125,000,000 versus $12,000,000 in 2010). It was conspicuous in the interviews that this difference in the budgets of these two areas of sport was only mentioned in passing:

We have a number of different support functions and opportunities that athletes, both Olympic and Paralympic, are offered, depending on which national team level they’re on, national ‘A’ or ‘B’ or ‘C’, and so forth. It actually varies by sport, so it’s not even equal across all of the Paralympic sports […] This is where it’s a little bit unique: Each sport can set up their own financial support system, so to speak. Most of the team sports are a good example, the financial support is fairly consistent […] It’s up to the sports to decide how much they are going to give to each athlete at those rankings. So on the Olympic side, they may say, if you are a number one ranking we’re gonna give you ten thousand dollars for the year, whereas the Paralympics as a sport may say, if you’re number one we’re gonna give you six thousand dollars for the year. So it depends on the overall budget that the national governing body has. So in some cases, it may be higher or lower, in the Olympics than Paralympics, in a given sport, in some cases it might be higher in the Paralympic than the Olympic. It really depends on the governing body and their plan and how they lay that out. So we have 45 different plans on the Olympic side, and 24 different plans on the Paralympic side. (USO5)

The officials we interviewed showed little understanding for the criticism of the unequal funding policy voiced by Paralympic athletes:

Over time, all athletes are never getting as much money as they’d like to get, whether they be able-bodied or disabled, and that’s a common kind of concern that’s probably been around since the beginning of time […] It’s not perfect but I think we’re making very significant progress. You know, it’s come so far from where it was many years ago, so I think we’re making really great progress. I mean, is it perfect? Probably not. Will it ever be totally perfect? Probably not. But there’s more and more recognition and that kind of thing. So we’re quite

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encouraged by many of the things that are happening here. (USO6)

The athletes, by contrast, revealed sometimes quite strong emotions when talking about this topic:

I can’t speak for the Olympic because I don’t know their facts. But what I can tell you is at the Paralympic,: if you medal, you do get money, you get 5,000 for a gold medal, but for the Olympics you get 25,000! So no, it ain’t equal, NO! It’s not, you know! (USA4)

I mean that’s UNHEARD of in the United States. Like, even though we’re a very successful country as far as wheelchair basketball, I mean, even if our, you know, NBA was awful and our able-bodied national team was awful, they would still get far more money. I think a lot of it has to do with the United States’ society that is so capitalistic and based on capitalism and making money that if your programme isn’t making a whole lot of money, then it doesn’t really matter. And I think that’s maybe another reason why wheelchair sports isn’t so popular or prevalent is because, you know, advertisers aren’t seeking us out to sponsor us or to give us sponsorships or include us in advertising because we’re not gonna make as much money as an able-bodied athlete that is not necessarily as good as a disabled athlete. (USA5)

That’s where the US, in my opinion, that’s where we’re failing the Paralympic side of things. I think that they always tell you that there’s just not enough money or there are too many athletes – they always have some reason. But it’s hard. I mean, it’s hard to be an elite athlete because you want to be able to train all the time and not have to worry about a job or anything like that. (USA6)

We always felt like the evil step-child. I mean, eventually by 2002 we were starting to integrate within the US Olympic Committee, and so US Olympic Committee and Paralympics were all integrated, but we did not, by any means, and we still don’t get paid. I mean, I’m on the athletes’ advisory council, and this is one of our biggest pushes, we still don’t get recognised at the same level. We’re still kind of that forgotten branch, and we still have to consistently squeak and scream for your opportunity for equal – not even for equal resources – for just enough resources! […] So by 2002, it was the first time that athletes got performance-based funding in Paralympic sport, which was a huge success because we’ve never got paid what Olympic athletes have been getting for a long, long time. So at least we were starting to get, you know, funding. Basically, if you won a Paralympic medal or world championships, you would get performance-based money. But it was one-tenth of what an Olympic athlete would get. And then it started moving up and then it was more. And now we’re still less. I think it’s one-fifth of what an Olympic athlete would get. (USA10)

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It’s a huge discrepancy between the two. Break it down monthly; we get 333 dollars a month if you are a medallist from Beijing. And you’re still in the national team programme. You get 166 dollars a month if you made the ‘B’ standard. That won’t even buy groceries. So and if I was an elite-level athlete in track and field on the traditional side, that would be more like 30,000 dollars a year. Many of my athletes are full-time athletes because they choose to be. Because of their disability they receive some government Medicare or Medicaid or social security. The soldiers are a little luckier […] well […] it’s not the right word to use, but they receive some VA [Veterans’ Administration] funding, they receive some medical support and some funding for their service, they get a certain percentage of their previous salary but most of these guys were not officers. (USC3)

Table 18 Funding of US-American high-performance sport

No state funding for USOC and US Paralympics

USOC (with its sub-division US Paralympics): financially self-sufficient organisation,

dependent on sponsoring

No financial support from USOC for disability sports organisations

Unequal budgets of Olympic and Paralympic sport ($125m vs. $12m)

State funding of the Wounded Warrior programme

The fact that the Wounded Warrior programme (a sports funding programme for war veterans and injured army personnel) benefited from a high level of state funding caused several of the athletes interviewed to conclude that they, as non-army personnel, were placed at a disadvantage. Some of the comments made in this context were marked by considerable bitterness:

In the six years that I was a member of the team, they only got two new athletes. And both are ex-military. And in the US the military has millions and millions of dollars every single year that they spend on quality of life for their veterans […] So, if you’re a military veteran, then you receive a $5,000-$7,000 monthly stipend for the rest of your life, all of your equipment is paid for […] US Paralympics only started getting this huge amount of money from the US military a couple of years ago, but some individuals can have an entire garage full of brand-new sports equipment […] So, you know, they have all of the cost of living part covered. They get free equipment, they get treated like rock stars when they go to all of these events, but they’re not athletes, and they never will be athletes. (USA2)

Others likewise expressed their resentment at this unequal (financial) treatment, although they also drew attention to the benefits which US-American disability sport – and thus the

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Paralympic movement – enjoyed as a result of the war veterans’ sporting activities:

That’s how the whole Paralympic movement started … was, you know, based on war veterans in Stoke Mandeville Games, and getting people recreating again. So, now, it is driving our resources in the US, the equipment as well, through prosthetics, through bikes, all different stuff, because we have so much money available though these veterans programmes that it’s pushing everything, at least in the US. […] They [i.e. war veterans] get everything! You know, like, you want a new bike? You get a new bike every year! You want this? You can get this. And it’s very hard. But at the same time, I realise that they are helping me. […] They’re also striving and working with the government not just to help support just the veterans, but to look at, you know, disability is an at-risk population, so health promotion, and health and human services, they’re trying to get budgets and money through that as well, to reach out to other people who aren’t just veterans. But, yeah, it’s definitely, I mean, it has kind of created the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. So, in the US disabled competitions, the veterans ‘have’, and they have everything and anything they could want, and the rest of them ‘have not’. But! Similar to the classification, the way I look at it as an athlete is that it’s evolving the whole movement forward. (USA10)

9.2.4 Infrastructural resources, notably in terms of cooperation with schools and

rehabilitation centres

Issues

1. To what extent is there cooperation with schools in talent identification and development?

2. To what extent is there cooperation with rehabilitation centres in talent identification and development?

Cooperation with schools

Canada

Several Canadian experts described the Paralympic Winter Games in 2010 as a turning point in the national strategy for recruiting new talent to Paralympic sport. Schools played a major role in this new strategy:

There were some interesting initiatives that took place in the lead up to the Vancouver 2010 Games that tried to address these issues, a lot of them spearheaded by the Canadian Paralympic Committee to sensitise healthcare professionals and physiotherapists, more and more teachers – not from the

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perspective that you should teach the Paralympics in your class – they should do that, too – but if you have got kids with disabilities, you know, encourage them. You know, go out and try a sport and get involved. But one of the interesting things is Canada has imported this model from Britain, where they call them ‘Give Them A Go’ days, and for sports that have a high dependence on equipment. It first started out with the wheelchair sports world and it has now been expanded more broadly, mostly in Ontario. (CAO6)

An expert from Alpine skiing reported that the Games provided an occasion for headmasters and teachers to invite Paralympic competitors to schools in order to try and reduce the inhibitions of pupils in the presence of people with disabilities. The majority of the athletes interviewed spoke of their experiences as motivational speakers:

There has been a lot of publicity, and a lot of our athletes have been asked by a lot of people to do a lot of public speaking. So there’s a lot of awareness, you know. And a lot of schools have contacted athletes and asked them to come to the schools and bring their medals, and bring their equipment and bring their skiers and stuff and show them. I know that’s the case. And even a lot of corporations. So the awareness is definitely increasing. (CAO1)

A representative of wheelchair basketball regretted, on the other hand, that although the education sector played a significant role in disability sport and numerous initiatives and programmes had been set up in connection with talent recruitment, wheelchair basketball needed to improve its efforts in this area:

I think in the stand-up world, the school system is huge for them. I think programmes are run in elementary schools and high schools and universities and colleges for basketball and we don’t have that at all in wheelchair basketball. There’s no school programme whatsoever. I think that’s huge, you know? You get kids attracted to the sport through the schools without really having to do a whole lot. That would be the number one thing in my mind. (CAO3)

Like their counterparts in the UK, several Canadian experts spoke about the problem of data protection in the search for pupils with disabilities who attended regular schools. The effort was now being made to reach an agreement with provincial governments as well as the National Paralympic Committee in order to obtain information about the (approximate) addresses of adolescent athletes with disabilities. Schools, which youngsters attended for as many as 12 years, were after all ideal places to get into contact with potential talents:

People go through that school system from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, for 12 years of schooling; they will also go and be the same people who are in the rehab centre from time to time. So it’s not like we’re getting one side and not the other, it’s how we fill in the gaps or what we can’t find. We have a lot of

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confidentiality issues that we’re working for, too. The school board won’t just tell us. And there are people in the school system who do not like the coding system because they think it’s a label, and they think it’s not fair to the students. And so they’re trying to get rid of the coding system, which means then we’ll be stuck. We’ll be back to not knowing where they are. But it’s something that we're working on and it may mean that the NPC has access to that information but we will not be able to give it to anyone else. We may be able to say, ‘In this province there are ‘x’ number,’ but we won’t be able to say, ‘They live in this city, this city, this city and this city.’ It won’t be so detailed that it breaks confidentiality issues. (CAO6)

The UK

In the UK (and especially in England) cooperation with schools is comparatively well established and is based above all on the work of the Youth Sport Trust, which focuses on (among other things) implementing a National Talent ID programme. A coach elucidated the cooperation between the Youth Sport Trust and British Swimming, the national federation for water sports.

They have set up for all English primary schools, that is sort of from the age of five to eleven, that all pupils with a disability have got to be taught to swim because that is part of our national curriculum. And everybody has got to have the opportunity to learn to swim, and anybody with impairment will then attend a festival within his or her locality. And swimmers that are identified with some skill sets, and that are able to swim at three different paces, will then go on to sort of an assessment day and then that feeds through into the club programme and then over time into sort of regional programmes and national programmes [...] Because we [i.e. senior officials of the swimming federation] were prepared to go with this structure anyway. We just needed a vehicle to put the initiative with. So Youth Sport Trust came to us and we were able to use the school programmes as our access into these disability swimmers, but if we did not have that, it would be very hard to move, identify, find, know where they are. And a lot of that is word of mouth, which is all networks and that’s always very good. (UKC4)

Data protection, which makes it much more difficult – or even impossible – to identify children and adolescents with disabilities who attend mainstream schools was a problem raised by the members of all the groups we interviewed in all three countries. This problem can be reduced, though, by using the procedures of the Youth Sport Trust, which bases its activities fundamentally on the principle of the inclusion of all pupils, whether with or without a disability – as explained in the following passage of the interview:

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Because the Youth Sport Trust goes in the other side of data protection, because they have got to be seen to be inclusive within the schools. They have got to give the same opportunities to those pupils with impairments as they do with those that are able-bodied. They do not always give us the details of the impairments. They just give us names of pupils that meet our criteria and then we go from there […] so, working with schools was definitely the solution to improve our infrastructure. (UKC4)

Taking pupils with disabilities into consideration in this programme of talent identification and development is extremely important according to the experts, not least because the majority of teachers at mainstream schools often lack the competence to meet all the special needs of pupils with disabilities. The consequence of this is either the complete exclusion of the pupils concerned from physical education and sports lessons or the inadequate supervision of these pupils in what are supposed to be integrative lessons, exemplified by the following two quotes from the interviews:

Where you’ve got a special educational needs coordinator, and maybe then a speech therapist or an occupational therapist that is not very keen on PE and sport, they will say, ‘Don’t worry about PE! Don’t worry about that. We will make sure that you have physiotherapy and hydrotherapy and so on.’ But, in fact, when they are in mainstream, they should be doing PE. I do not have any problem with them doing hydrotherapy and physiotherapy, but not instead of PE [...] I ask those pupils, ‘Well, what do you do when it’s PE?’ And they answer, ‘Oh, we stay in the classroom or we go to the library.’ Well, twenty years ago, or twenty-five years ago in 1985 I said, ‘I’m going to write a book saying, 'Please do not send me to the Library!’’ I had never thought I would still be saying it now. (UKO6)

The average PE teacher cannot acknowledge the child’s success. So for example, this was Johnny, who has got CP, sitting in a wheelchair, and he decided to participate in a school sports day in the 100 metres. What I have seen happen is little Johnny being pushed in a wheelchair down 100 metres, because he’s too slow to do it himself [...] That is ridiculous and it’s making little Johnny think that he is useless and just relies on everybody else to do everything for him. And the other point is that the teachers don’t understand that little Johnny’s time could be really good. You know, if they let little Johnny run his 100 metres by himself, maybe he might set a world record. But they don’t know that. They don’t know what classification he is. They don’t know anything. There’s no comparison, basically [...] what needs to happen is: there needs to be a push in universities to educate the teachers. In the teacher training courses, there needs to be a compulsory section on disability [...] At the moment, the section on disability is optional and nobody does it. (UKA1)

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Apart from the activities of the Youth Sport Trust, senior federation officials responsible for disability sport are evidently aware of the benefits of cooperation with schools. The following extract from the interview with an Alpine skiing federation official reflects this attitude:

We then have specific support for schools and youth programmes. I have been to schools to chat to the kids, the six, seven, or eight-year-olds, and they love it. The other great thing about it is that we got into that area, so school kids actually from ten years upwards, now, are actually in our youth racing development team. So it’s not inconceivable that we could have our first teenage Alpine athletes at the next Games, which again would be another massive progress. We’ve got basically now athletes aged twelve up to forty-five, so a big spread, and the knack is to have enough new blood coming through but at the same time the ones coming on, and then ones that are tailing off, trying to make use of them if they want to be involved […] It is not looking for the win today, it is looking for those several wins in the future. (UKO1)

In England athletics officials work together with three Disability Sports Officers who are responsible for the different regions of the country and coordinate the cooperation between England Athletics and the education sector, first of all by establishing initial contacts with schools. One interview partner spoke of the value of this coordination, adding that (sports) teachers at (mainstream) schools did not as a rule take the initiative in developing sporting talents with disabilities and recommending them to the appropriate institutions:

We need to be tackling schools. And there’s, again, not a sufficient pathway for athletes with disabilities within schools to develop directly, either through home countries or through national disability sport organisations. So we look at initiatives directly targeting schools […] The disability sport officers would be working directly with England Athletics, who will have a much wider staff base, and they will be coordinating that staff to go into schools to find, to look for these athletes with disabilities and they have the potential to become athletes on the programme. (UKO2)

Several British interview partners, too, mentioned that talent seeking was far easier in the past, when it was usual for children and adolescents with disabilities to attend special needs schools:

You just go to the schools and you get the kids [...] I’ve got a little boy and in his class are two children with cerebral palsy and a deaf child, and it’s only ’cause I can see them physically that I know that. The school can give them that information [about opportunities in sport] and let the parents ask them to be released, so we’ve got five pupils in ten years. Today a lot of the kids are mainstream, which makes it slightly difficult to try to find them. (UKO3)

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Treloar School and College, a specialist school situated in Hampshire but well known throughout the country, was named explicitly in several interviews. Focusing on educating and training children and adolescents with physical disabilities, the school provides excellent conditions for the development of disability sport:

Treloar had, and still has, a really good reputation within disability sports [...] There were swimmers who represented Great Britain at the Paralympics. And they had very strong basketball sports and athletics and so on. And I think the history of Treloar is it was thought of as the grammar school for people with disabilities. So in those sports where you need an understanding of the sports and the techniques and everything else – and of course in most sports, you do – then Treloar had an advantage in a way, in that we had a big number of people with disabilities, we’ve got a big pool to choose from. We’re also one of the biggest schools and colleges in the country. So whereas at other schools you may have six people in a class attached to a mainstream school, and they’ve all got different disabilities. We had 300 students across the school and the college. (UKO5)

A former Treloar pupil described his schooldays, in which sport evidently stood right at the centre of things, with elation. At the same time he regretted that, with the introduction of inclusive education at mainstream schools, sports development at Treloar had in the meantime been put on the back burner:

I went to the special school and I started doing sports. I started doing every single sport under the sun. And that’s probably not an exaggeration. I did football and hockey and cricket and table cricket, boxing and athletics and uhh, I must have missed about – judo, fencing, boxing […] But today they no longer do sport. The first reason is that because of the government changing their policy of admissions to the school, the kind of people that they are taking in now, right, are a lot more disabled. So the kind of people they are taking in now are the kind of people who have to be fed through a tube for example. So the school has almost turned into a kind of care centre with a school attached, yeah? So a lot of the people who could play sports are no longer at the school. And then the second thing as well is that the health and safety aspect of it has really got in the way now. The schools are so scared of something going wrong, they’re so scared of some disabled kid getting injured or something. It’s appalling. It’s really, really bad. It really upsets me actually, to think that, you know, the things that I really enjoyed doing when I went to that school aren’t being done because they can’t bother to fill in the paperwork for it. It’s a massive problem. And one where I don’t think there is an easy way around. Because the problem is that the able- bodied schools do not have the expertise to deal with disability. Because before, the disabled people went to special schools, and now are going to mainstream schools, and it’s taken mainstream schools by surprise, I think. I go into a lot of

schools to do talks and things, and I’ve talked to a lot of teachers or whatever, you

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know, and they’re really confused by the world of disability. They have never encountered it before. They don’t know really what it’s about. And then when you get into more specific things like classification and stuff like that, they’re completely lost. Completely, you know. A lot of them do not even know what CP is. (UKA1)

The USA

Among the US-American experts we interviewed, there was no clear consensus about the role of schools in recruiting and developing talent for disability sport. One official emphasised the fact that putting an end to special schools had made talent identification more difficult; as a result of strict data protection regulations it was almost impossible to find pupils with disabilities. Nevertheless, Paralympic Sport Clubs were at pains to establish partnerships with schools, and the first positive results were to be observed:

The biggest challenge that we have in this country with the young people is that our school systems have changed. 15 or 20 years ago, people with physical disabilities were in special schools. And so it was easier to go into these schools and educate. And now our laws have changed, where students with disabilities are integrated, and with the privacy laws and so forth, it’s much more difficult to get the word out. We almost have to go school by school […] We’re working hard on school systems, and again, that’s one of the benefits of the community-based Paralympic sport clubs, because they live in that community and can establish the relationships with the schools, and they can go in and recruit, and we also are starting to have quite a bit of success where Paralympic sport club staff are going into the schools and offering programmes as part of the school day in a number of communities. We’ve had a lot of success, for instance, in bringing in judo programmes for blind students. So they’ll incorporate judo as their physical education programme, which is good for us because number one, they’re getting some good physical education, but it’s exposing them to Paralympic sport as well. (USO4)

We’ve done some studies on these. 43 per cent came to their first competition as any type of competition at a Paralympic sport club or a disability sports organisation. So 43 per cent of our national team had that first exposure in those clubs, and then 23 per cent came from school programmes. And then another 13 per cent from parks and recreation programmes. So basically their entry point into track and field comes through those local competitions. (USC3)

Other experts we interviewed were not so convinced about the efforts which schools go to in order to identify sporting talents among their pupils:

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The schools are way behind in identifying potential talent within the disabled student population. We have much better luck or much better results with community groups and parks and recreation than we do with school. (USO1)

Depending on the type and severity of their particular disability, the opportunities of taking up (inclusive) sports vary greatly for young athletes at American high schools. The following comment was made in connection with athletes with dwarfism, for example:

Most of ours can compete probably close to Junior High and then when the height difference becomes more apparent there is more risk for injury. So that is the age when a lot of ours drop out of, like, the recreation soccer and basketball. So we do have a few exceptional athletes that are in their high-school teams for soccer and we had one that played basketball and wrestled. So it becomes a safety issue when they get older […] We have a track-and-field athlete that was in his high-school team and he just graduated from college, but he worked out with the college team. So they [i.e. the college coaches] are willing to help train our athletes. These are the dwarf athletes. For athletes with other disabilities it probably is more complicated. I think a lot of them probably go through the local disability sports clubs and Blaze Sports. (USO2)

A wheelchair sports expert had the impression that an increasing number of high schools were enabling their pupils in wheelchairs to take part in sports (lessons), although it was especially individual sport that was encouraged. Team sports such as wheelchair basketball were difficult to put into practice, not least because of the small numbers of pupils with diabilities at high schools. At colleges that actively recruit wheelchair athletes, team sports can also be played:

What we’re seeing more and more, and hearing of, is that kids in high schools now are being able to letter in their sport and participate on their team, even if there’s some separation in terms of how points are accrued and so forth, but, there’s still, you know – I’ve been to a couple of my athletes’ track events at their high schools, and they get to run and push their chairs alongside their able- bodied friends and athletes, team mates. […] We’re having to fight to get wheelchair athletes the opportunity to compete on their local high-school team, primarily in track, in tennis. There’s not really the opportunity in basketball at this point, you know, until you get to college. I’m totally unaware of any high-school wheelchair basketball team. Now, within the state of Georgia and the state of Illinois, there are high-school athletic associations that are addressing that more, where they are taking four or five different schools, because you don’t have enough kids at one high school to make a team. So, they’re being proactive by trying to draw from five different schools. It could be different counties and high schools to make one team. And so that’s both in Georgia and the state of Illinois.

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The problem is related to the number of students that have disabilities in high schools. (USC4)

Cooperation with rehabilitation facilities

Canada

Several interview partners laid emphasis on the cooperation with rehabilitation centres, which they thought showed promise of success in recruiting potential sporting talent. However, two reservations were added here: firstly, not all types of disablement were dealt with in these centres; and, secondly, the activities they provided were above all team sports:

The team sports are much stronger at recruiting because the rehabilitation community supports the team sports much more because it’s much easier for a rehabilitation centre to support a team sport that a number of children can play that team sport together than it is to try to have one child go to skiing, one child go to swimming, one child go to cross country. It’s much easier to send them all to wheelchair basketball and play together. So there are advantages in terms of recruitment for the team sports versus the individual sports. (CAC5)

Various experts pointed out that cooperating with rehabilitation centres was borrowed from the example of the British Give-Them-A-Go Days scheme:

But one of the interesting things is Canada has imported this model from Britain, where they call them ‘Give Them A Go’ days and for sports that have a high dependence on equipment […] It first started out with the wheelchair sports world and it has now been expanded more broadly, mostly in Ontario. They are essentially programmes where they would contact rehab centres […] You have a disability and you can do sport. And so they all have equipment available, you know, basketball chairs, tennis chairs and stuff like that, sledges, and you can come out and try the sport and get basic instruction in how to use the equipment and have a little bit of a taste of what it is like, and then you are given information about this recreational league you can then join. And then the idea is that if you’ve got an interest in pursuing that sport seriously, then you can be led into other programmes. (CAO6)

Several officials saw the advantage of cooperating with rehabilitation centres in the fact that representatives from sport were able to introduce patients to a particular sport and be supported in this by the centre’s staff, for example by physiotherapists. These, moreover, could give information about the physical condition of the patients, which is indispensable in order to prevent them from perhaps taking up a sport too early and then completely abandoning it as a result of experiencing phases of disappointment or failure. Furthermore, they act as persons of trust for the patients and thus assume an important role, especially in

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the case of children:

They have different programmes where they go into rehab centres and hospitals for children and sick kids, and different things, to find athletes or to find individuals with a disability and introduce the game to them. Any time we have found somebody who wants to get involved, we direct him to the local clubs or provincial organisation where he can find out more […] Part of what we have tried to do is that we develop a relationship with the rehab centre, that we go in with the rehab centre, so that there is a familiar face there, and then it is the rehab people maybe that are actually helping to deliver our message. So it can be the physiotherapists or whoever it might be; they are part of it too and they understand the importance of what we offer. (CAO3)

Because we do – and maybe that’s a good point – we do work very closely with the medical folk to ensure that these injured peers are ready and capable to do the training and to participate in these activities. Because the last thing we want is to have them incur secondary injuries or worse, regress rather than progress. So we do work with primarily the physiotherapists, and we rely on them to provide us with the recommendations in terms of ‘Yes, this person is ready’ or ‘This person, maybe let’s wait a little bit longer.’ If they are physically capable, the likelihood is that they are also mentally ready to take this on, so that their experience is positive. We don’t want someone to come who’s not physically ready because if they happen to have a bad experience, well, actually the impression they’re gonna walk away with will be negative rather than positive. (CAO4)

The great majority of our Canadian interview partners described rehabilitation centres as ideal places of contact for federations to visit with the aim of recruiting newcomers to sport. Of immense importance and ultimately the decisive factor in the success of such recruitment measures is the psychological tact and empathy that is essential, especially when talking to patients with a recently acquired disability:

Because lots of times if it is a young person or even a younger adult who is recently injured, it is a rehab process; there are a whole lot of things they are dealing with. They are dealing with being newly injured – there is a whole set of things that they are going through and having to deal with. Getting involved in a sport may not be something they are considering at that point, but it is more of an education and awareness that this exists. And we try to make them aware of how to improve their quality of life – that it is about being physically active. So you are trying to promote a quality of life thing and an opportunity to be involved in something. If the individuals have been involved in sport before it is usually an easier transition because then they understand the importance of it. If they

haven’t, then sometimes it is a harder thing. And also it depends on the individual, I

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mean, sometimes it takes people a few years just to be able to deal with their injury, and overcome that emotional shock of just being a person in a wheelchair. So we might not get them for a couple of years due to that. So it’s definitely tough and I think recruitment at that level is really challenging, and it’s almost individual and on a case-by-case basis on how you approach the person and how you either bring them along or, you know, don’t – you have to be respectful. I think the key is what we try to do is just deliver the awareness: this is something that you can pursue and follow and that is a healthy active lifestyle; and again it is participation at whatever level that they choose. Not everybody is going to be an elite athlete, but that opportunity still to participate and just have a healthy, active lifestyle – whether it is just played for recreational purposes or for being an elite athlete, those are the kind of messages that we are trying to convey. (CAO3)

A national coach drew attention to a “catch” in working together with rehabilitation centres: the development of children with disabilities in such centres only worked up to the point when they entered school. At this point the problem of data protection arose, and this led to the consequence that their location was no longer clearly identifiable:

The big catch in Canada is that the rehabilitation community touches children from one year old to five or six years of age. And then we lose them to the school system. And then we see at about 17 or 18 years of age, the rehabilitation community picks up those children again. So from the school years, from elementary through to the high-school years, we don’t know where the kids with disabilities are. The education system keeps that data, but they are not releasing the data as to where those children are. So that’s the next initiative that we have now is how we can better, strategically, find where our kids are from six years of age to 18 years of age. Where are the children with disabilities located? So we can better offer our programme. (CAC5)

The UK

Among the British members of the sample it was the representatives of Alpine skiing that drew particular attention to the role of rehabilitation centres in connection with talent recruitment:

The spinal cord injury charity is involved in all the spinal units and they also help teach wheelchair skills, and they do lots of other activities. They’re well known amongst the spinal people in England. They don’t just take people skiing; they do lots of other things as well. They’re involved in all the spinal units. (UKA4)

So there were people coming – we had somebody that introduced us to wheelchair basketball, and that was probably about it when I was in hospital. I wanted to go skiing again, but I didn’t realise how I would be able to do this. And through Salisbury and Odstock, the spinal unit there, I got involved in water skiing

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first, and then through speaking to someone in water skiing, they were, like, ‘Well, there’s equipment, you can go snow skiing!’ and he would give a contact – and it all sort of barrel-rolled from there. (UKA8)

The USA

Almost all US-American athletes reported that it was during their stay at a rehabilitation centre that they were first made familiar with (disability) sports programmes; and there they were also given unlimited support, for example in terms of trying out different kinds of sport. The following extracts may serve as examples:

Well to me, on the Paralympic side, the parallel is the hospital. You can’t necessarily be looking in schools, but pretty much every person with a disability has some contact with the medical profession. (USA2)

I was basically living in the hospital and would do in-patient rehab in Florida, but kind of once I was well enough to get out of the hospital and my family moved to Houston. I was doing out-patient, so I was living with my family and my mom would take me every day to do out-patient rehab in Houston. And then that's kind of where I got involved and found out, and my parents were introduced to wheelchair sports, and they knew that I got injured so young that this would be a good opportunity. I think when you get injured young, you can do the transition much easier into everything because you’re so young and my parents were, like, ‘Well, this has happened and we’re gonna take every opportunity we can’ – to raise me normally. So they got me involved in sports. (USA5)

I got involved in sport after the accident through the rehab hospital. One of the therapists was the coach. So once it got closer to the time where I was going to be finished and I was leaving, he told me about the team and told my parents, and they brought me to one of their practices. And then I liked it, I liked the kids, so I went back. It was a kids-only team, it was up until 18. And so I was on that team and that was all disabled children from around the area. (USA6)

A Wounded Warriors representative summed up the important role that rehabilitation centres played for the war wounded. His explanation of the term transition state and the significance of sporting activities, though, apply equally to the civilian sector:

We have people that are at these medical treatment facilities when they first get back. And … but generally speaking, the first introduction at that point is only to create an awareness for them that there is hope after they get through some of their medical procedures. If it’s a young person that has lost a limb and they are in the hospital, they tend to think of all of the things they can no longer do. So what we try to do is to get to them very early to give them hope that there are some other things, and when you are ready to get back into the swimming pool

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and those kinds of things, we’ll be there to try to provide assistance. So basically that’s where it starts, as far as that introduction, and then part of the processing for rehabilitation within the United States, those individuals will then go from the high level of medical treatment back into what’s called the warrior, in our case, the Warrior Transition Units. And the term ‘transition’ really means as it’s kind of defined. These people are in a transition state. They are not quite well enough to go back into a military environment. They are not quite well enough to leave the service and go back to their homes. They are in a sort of a holding place and continuing to get well, but they certainly no longer need the direct care that they were getting inside a hospital environment. They are actually in a transition state. And so, that’s where we try to put the greatest amount of effort of providing a sports programming as part of their daily function […] We try to guide them to sports opportunities that don’t require a lot of equipment. You know, because that can be a cost to an individual, and that can be an inhibitor to that opportunity. So we try to take advantage of what in fact is in their immediate environment and could easily be utilised, and it’s also something that there’s a greater likelihood that they’ll in fact do something along these lines when they get back into their home community. And as an example, out on the West Coast here, they have a surfing programme as part of the rehabilitation. Well, that’s really great and we encourage them to do that, but also they need to be realistic that if the person lives 1,000 kilometres from an ocean, the likelihood of them actually using surfing on a daily basis is pretty remote, but in fact if we teach them how to get back onto a bike and to get involved in aquatic sports. Not necessarily swimming but all kinds of aquatic sports, to do strength and conditioning programmes, archery programmes – things that you’ll typically find in communities, and then that opens up some different kinds of opportunities for them. (USO6)

9.2.5 Commitments

Issues

1. Are targeted scouting measures carried out at the sport-for-all/ recreational sport level in order to recruit potential talents for sport?

2. To what extent was the decision of top athletes to take up sport, as well as their further development in a particular sport, based not so much on systematic measures as on their own initiative?

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Recruitment measures as a way of inducing people with disabilities to take up recreational sport and sport for all

Canada

The best-known and longest-standing recruitment measure for newcomers to sport in Canada is the Bridging the Gap programme. Designed as an awareness programme, it was launched in British Columbia in 1998 and now operates in all Canadian provinces in the wheelchair sports of basketball, rugby and tennis.

They are essentially programmes where they would contact rehab centres or special schools or physiotherapy associations and try to get posters up and come to, you know, the personal community centre on Tuesday at seven pm and try out some sports. You have a disability and you can do sport. And so they all have equipment available, you know, basketball chairs, tennis chairs and stuff like that, sledges, and you can come out and try the sport and get basic instruction in how to use the equipment and have a little bit of a taste of what it is like and then you are given information about this recreational league you can then join. And then the idea is that if you’ve got an interest in pursuing that sport seriously, then you can be led into other programmes. (CAO2)

In addition, in an actual comparison of different sports Alpine skiing was named by several interview partners as an example of good practice. According to a skiing coach this sport has been carrying out systematic recruitment measures in the sphere of Paralympic sport for about ten years. The following two quotes illustrate this:

I would recommend, like, the learning process of skiing would go through CADS, which is the Canadian Association for Disabled Skiing. They are based on a recreational programme, and they are very strong at the entry level. Their job is sort of teaching people what skiing is and getting them skiing. They work at a recreational level. So they do work at the entry level, but their focus is not competition. Their focus is enjoyment, active living, skiing as a way of life, as a recreational sport, as a hobby. I would say Alpine was one of the more successful sports in terms of recruiting new people in. (CAO1)

I would say Alpine was one of the more successful sports in terms of recruiting new people in. Why Alpine? I would say we made more of an effort, and go, ‘All right. We get these people in, what are we going to do with them?’ So they made a plan and they created some junior development camps, and what they did was that they had national coaches go to these development days so that they could identify […] If people came out to try the sport, they could identify them a lot faster and provide them with the one-on-one encouragement they felt would

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help to hook them into the sport. (CAO2)

A sign of the progressive outlook of the skiing federation in being aware of and integrating sport for people with a disability is to be seen in the fact that modules on disability sport have been incorporated into the general ski instructor training programme. As a result of an incentive for ski instructors to gain double credits towards the renewal of their licence by taking part in a Disability Recruitment Programme, more instructors from able-bodied skiing are taking part in this module and are consequently losing their inhibitions with athletes with a disability and realising that ‘coaching these disabled kids isn’t that hard.’ According to one coach, a visible effect of this process was the increasing willingness of ski clubs to open up their beginners courses for children with disabilities:

In Alpine skiing, a coach has to be licensed every year. And every year they have to do so many professional development education credits in order to get their licence. So what we did is we said, ‘If you are a coach in an able-bodied club and you come and spend a day with us in our disability recruitment programme, we’ll give you two professional development credits toward your licence for free. You don’t have to pay to come, just show up.’ So we’ve actually had a number of coaches who have come to take advantage of the professional development opportunity and, in turn, they have in one day, they’re going like, ‘You know, coaching these disabled kids isn’t that hard.’ So now a lot of the entry-level clubs in the country are starting to invite kids with disabilities to join their clubs because they find that it’s easier to integrate them into the clubs than they originally thought it might be. So in Alpine it’s actually starting to get much stronger at the entry level because of that process. (CAC5)

Criticism was voiced by the experts we interviewed, on the other hand, of federations which did not appear to be handling the issue of recruiting people with disabilities interested in sport with any priority. Certain federations (such as the athletics federation) were at least aware of the issue and had (recently) started to launch their first initiatives:

In athletics, we’re just starting to implement that kind of a programme at a recruitment level; we’ve been doing this for a year now. So it’s just a younger process, but I think the process is ultimately to get to the provincial disability organisations, to get to the rehabilitation community, and that’s the groups we need to connect with. (CAC5)

A rather unconventional method of talent recruitment was described by a national coach who demanded that the members of his national team motivate at least two or three people (with disabilities and an interest in sport) every year to take part in “sampler camps”:

It works quite well, really. I’ve got a camp next weekend in Ontario with nine young people – 13, 14, 16, 18, 23 years old. People in wheelchairs who said it was

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something they’d be interested in. It’s more sort of a ‘sampler camp’ for them, and we’ll see who wants to and who doesn’t. All my athletes know people with disabilities. They mix in circles where there are other disabled people. When they tell them about their sport and show how enthusiastic they are about it – there’s a chance they can get the others enthusiastic about it, too […] And what’s very important is that athletes are there at these camps, athletes with disabilities who do competitive sports, so that the parents, especially the parents, can see what’s possible. And then the children say, ‘I’d like to be like (such and such a person). How did you manage to become a Paralympic athlete? Can I be one, too?’ The children realise it’s possible to be in the national team, even if you’re disabled, and you can go on trips, exactly like them […] Idon’t know if it’ll work. It’s an experiment. At least, it worked in Ontario. But we’ve invented something that not every country has, and we’ll see how it turns out. (CAC1)

Although the reaction of the national team members was at first rather reserved, the national coach appealed to them and eventually succeeded in whipping up support for this joint effort, which they then regarded as a challenge:

At first I had to persuade the athletes to come to these ‘have-a-go’ days. And then they noticed it was quite an interesting job, and that got round within the team. Now, basically, it’s taken for granted when I ask if they’ve got time for a bit of youth work at the weekend, they say yes. Nobody answers, ‘No, I can’t come’ any more. (CAC1)

It was stressed in the interviews that in the course of an awareness programme it was extremely important for the organisers of the camp (and among them active athletes in particular) to establish personal contact with those taking part so as to ensure that this experience was entirely positive for the participants and also to awaken interest and even enthusiasm. The organisers were fully aware of the risk that participants might give up immediately as a result of a first failure or disappointment or because they felt the atmosphere was not sufficiently supportive. A national coach described this in the following words:

The sort of flip side of that is if you have an athlete or a family go in and they have a negative experience, it doesn’t help it. To give an example: the first experience that a kid has doing Para-Nordic is sitting in a sit ski freezing his ass off and he feels cold and miserable. That’s not a positive experience. So it is really, really important that those first encounters and first contacts become positive and fun. (CAC2)

An official drew attention to what she considered to be a wasted opportunity of staging a massive recruiting campaign for people interested in sport after the 2010 Paralympic Games

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in Vancouver:

Every national governing body could have done this, but obviously they did not prioritise it. Maybe they are not sure how to start? Sceptical about the use of it? I think that those would probably be, you know, the major themes. I know that after the Games there were a number of articles that came out in the press where people from Cross Country Canada where doing a little bit of navel gazing. We missed an opportunity! We messed up there. And a lot more! Because they can now capitalise a little bit on what happened during the Games, but it doesn’t have the same kind of a lure as the home games. (CAO2)

A different view was expressed by a national coach who was convinced that the Paralympic movement in Canada had profited enormously from the Paralympic Games being held on home ground:

I think one of the benefits that we got out of Vancouver 2010 was that there is a hell of a lot more people aware of the Paralympic movement and Paralympic sport now than there were prior to the Games. But what we need to do now is to build a vehicle or multiple vehicles to get out there and promote Paralympic sport. (CAC2)

Among other things, this positive development had led, he added, to a large network of national coaches and senior officials in the various federations who for the first time, extensively and across all sports, exchanged information and views on efficient and effective ways of recruiting and developing talent in Paralympic sport. He outlined a five-point plan, developed during a two-day conference, which was to be implemented in all sports and whose aim was to eliminate the element of chance in identifying talent, which was thought to play too great a role at present (“We’re developing sort of infrastructure and capacity around and doing a better job and trying to eliminate that accidental thing” – CAC2).

It was as a lot of brain storming, it was busy […] One of the things we talked about was developing a programme where there would be two teams of people that may travel around the country. You would hire some summer students and put them in a motor home and let them start, one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast and they just drive across the country. And at every major city, or whatever, they advertise and say ‘All right! Come and learn about Para, come and a have a go.’ I think what we called it was a ‘have-a-go day’. And people would be able to come to wherever, and get in a wheelchair basketball chair or get in a racing chair, or meet some Paralympic swimmers or stuff like that where we would be able to expose people. […] One of the biggest things that we sort of flagged was, ‘How do we get to the parents?’ Because I think that's a key factor in all of this, getting to the parents and having them understand like, ‘You know what? Your child with a disability has an opportunity to do sport. And here are all

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the benefits that your child will get from participating in sport.’ […] If there are five key things that we have to attend to, that is a big one: how do we get to the parents? And it’s a tough one to figure out, you know? So it was about developing partnerships with the people out there in the world that deal with parents of children with disabilities on a daily basis, right? You know the Canadian Physiotherapists Association, the Children's Hospital people, etc. […] Within a national athlete-with-a-disability database, we would essentially start tracking all the athletes with a disability. So any time, if a kid showed up for swimming lessons or they showed up to play soccer or whatever, they would start a database and they would track that athlete and then there would be follow-ups. If a kid started playing soccer, let’s say, and a kid played soccer for four or five years, and all of a sudden stopped playing soccer, where did that kid go? And did they go to another Paralympic sport or did they fall off the grid, as the case may be, they stopped being involved in sports? We’re developing sort of infrastructure and capacity around and doing a better job and trying to eliminate that accidental thing. And one of the other things that we talked a lot about was that there’s no physical literacy programme for young kids with disabilities. That was an absolutely crucial part of it because, by the time the kid is 6 or 7, his able- bodied peers have progressed immensely, and he’s got zero skills, so the idea is finding somebody who’s already got a developmental physical literacy programme for kids with disability or started one so we’re not reinventing the wheel. And that was another one of our key points, you know, doing the due diligence and the research to ensure that we’re not reinventing the wheel. If there’s already a programme out there somewhere in the world, we need to do research to find out where it is, getting in touch with the people who developed it and then finding out, ‘Let’s not rebuild this. Let’s take this one and modify it so it’ll fit a Canadian situation.’ So that was another thing that we talked about: rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, find existing programmes and then develop it further to meet the needs of our situation. For two days it was a brilliant, it was a really, really good two days of work. (CAC2)

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An overview of the key ideas of the five-point plan is given in Table 19.

Table 19 Key contents of the five-point plan devised by the Canadian expert network for all

sports

There would be two teams of people that

may travel around the country. You would

hire some summer students and put them in

a motor home and let them start, one on

the West Coast and one on the East Coast

and they just drive across the country and

offer ‘have-a-go days’.

country-wide information campaign in

mobile info hub

starting at west and east coasts

spreading information and ‘have-a-

go’ days

presenting role models (active athletes)

How do we get to the parents? And it’s a

tough one to figure out, you know.

parent work: persuading parents, who

are often unaware and/or overcautious

making them aware of opportunities

presenting role models

Within a national athlete-with-a-disability

database, we would essentially start

tracking all the athletes with a disability. So

any time, if a kid showed up for swimming

lessons or they showed up to play soccer or

whatever, they would start a database and

they would track that athlete and then

there would be follow- ups.

setting up database

gathering data from a child’s first

contact with disability sport onwards

tracking the child’s further development

And one of the other things that we talked

a lot about was that there’s no physical

literacy programme for young kids with

disabilities.

drawing up a programme to train

general basic movement and motor

skills

If there’s already a programme out there

somewhere in the world, we need to do

research to find out where it is, getting in

touch with the people who developed it and

then finding out, ‘Let’s not rebuild this.

Let’s take this one and modify it so it’ll fit

a Canadian situation.’

researching existing programmes in

other countries and, if suitable,

adapting them to Canadian needs

promoting cooperation with other

countries

The interviews with the Canadian athletes confirmed the impression gained so far of the exemplary role of Alpine skiing in talent identification and development. All downhill racers reported that they had developed an enthusiasm for the sport of ski racing through specially

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devised beginners’ courses:

It was night skiing once a week. And I just went there. And they teach you different racing techniques and stuff. I just went there and started skiing and having a good time. And the instructor I had suggested that I go race in the BC championships. It was, like, ‘OK!’ (CAA7)

My parents found a programme through ‘Champs’, which is the Child Amputees of Canada. It’s part of a group called ‘war amps’. And they found a programme here in Vancouver at Gross Mountain and they asked, ‘Is this something you want to try?’ And I said, ‘Yes’ – and that was pretty much it. I went there once a week every Sunday for the winter and it was a ‘learn-to-ski’ programme. It was just an introductory thing, you know, a learn-to-ski programme. (CAA8)

Both athletes affirmed that they were familiar with current beginners’ courses. These they found extremely important and noted that they had developed enormously since they themselves started skiing. As far as they knew, the kinds of programme that were offered were unique when compared with other sports:

Our focus for so long was 2010, but now it’s over and our focus is on development and we’re very much focused on trying to find as many young individuals as possible. […] We just had the very first ever dry-land camp for prospects team. So a team of all teenagers – I think the oldest one was maybe 20, he might have been 20 – and we invited them to join our dry-land camp, so they participated, not always with us, but they had our coaches and they were working with our coaches to do dry-land programmes together. And there were seven or eight of them, which maybe isn’t a ton but at least it’s a start. For example 10 years ago, when I went through and I was that age, I was the only one and I did it largely on myself, and nobody invited me to a dry-land training camp or anything like that. So it’s been a big change. Now it is more toward development and growing the pool of athletes just so there are more. And if there are more, in theory, there are one or two who are better. But I think that is unique to our team, and I don’t think that happens in any other sports. (CAA8)

Athletes from other sports emphasised that the fact that they had taken up sport in the first place was largely due to their own initiative.

I believe it was just watching probably Athens. Athens and then Torino a little bit too. No! By Torino I knew it already. Let me think. Yeah, I guess it was Athens that inspired me. And during all that research I kind of learned a little about the Paralympics, too. So I contacted someone at Cross Country Canada and gave them my results and they said, ‘Well, that’s quite impressive. You go to an IPC development camp in Norway.’ (CAA4)

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The UK

British officials referred to a great number of sport-specific programmes which had taken up the cause of talent identification and development. Examples of these are examined in the following from the sports of Alpine skiing, swimming and athletics.

The activities of Disability Snowsport UK were highly commended in the interviews by several experts. One advantage of Disability Snowsport UK was to be seen in its function as an umbrella organisation which amalgamated numerous local groups and was thus able to coordinate talent seeking activities effectively:

There’s the charity, Disability Snowsport. It covers the activity weeks, taking a number of disabled youths and adults away to learn to ski and covering all sorts of disabilities, so not necessarily just physical ones, but also people with mental health problems and various things and basically just giving them the opportunity. Some of them will never do more than recreational skiing. The idea is just getting them out there. Over the winter period we will do probably ten of these weeks from about November until April. So taking groups of up to 15 depending on the level of disability, because obviously if you’ve got more severely disabled, it takes more resources, then you’ve got less time to support. So we have to make sure that there is a bit of a balance there […] We then have specific support for schools and youth programmes – in terms of those schools that have kids and teens that want to do it, and that goes on. And then also in terms of particular projects, where we get a certain amount of funding and we can go away and sort of invest in the people, structure or function to support the community in a particular place. […] Instead of being local and managed locally, by having this umbrella organisation it is national and managed nationally. Now if somebody phones up a local group because they have heard about it, they then – through that local group – will probably hear, ‘Well, actually, there is a local group closer to you.’ In the past, you certainly wouldn’t know about that local group, unless you knew that the snow dome existed, knew where they were. (UKO1)

A coach confirmed that the federation was contacted by many parents requesting information on skiing programmes for their children. The steps that parents are recommended to take are described in the following extract:

Actually what happens is the parents would ring our national office. What we have is a really good recreational programme; even in the UK we have a lot of indoor snow domes. We also have our offices based up in Scotland, which is in the only skiable areas of the UK. There’s a ski school that’s run out of it. So, essentially, if somebody approached us, they’d probably approach Disability Snow Sport itself. And they would be directed to the closest ski school, whether

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that would be Scotland or anywhere in the UK where they have a snow dome, of which we have programmes in every snow dome that’s in the UK. Essentially what would then happen is we have a development officer who would, if they showed interest in racing, would kind of point them in our direction. We also have another disability officer who works for the Disability Snowsport Organisation on the recreational side, and she had done some work with me and had done some development coaching work as well. And, essentially, it would go through her and she would direct them to us and we would invite them into the youth stuff that we are doing. (UKC2)

The swimming experts’ comments suggest that in this sport, too, talent identification is structured and carried out systematically, as revealed by the following extract in which one of our interview partners describes the typical procedures, taking Scotland as his example. Although it does not benefit from the talent programme of the Youth Sport Trust, which operates solely in England, Scotland can boast a number of successes. The basic advantage of cooperating with the Youth Sport Trust in England is that it enables access to schools:

Scotland is divided into four regions, of which there is one person’s role as responsible for disability swimming and within each region they will hold each year two talent ID days for children from eight to fifteen. Youth Sports Trust is an English body and there is not the same multi-sport talent ID programme in Scotland and that’s the difference. So, the regions will try and find – write to the schools, contact various organisations, disability organisations – to see if they can send swimmers along to the talent day in each region and the structure of the actual talent activity is the same whether it is in England, Scotland or Wales. So that’s where we get the consistency. So, hopefully, the people we identify, wherever the talent day is, will have similar skills. So when they start moving through the home nation programme or British Swimming, they are all starting from a similar starting point, regardless of their national location […] They will then be identified as having some talent potential; we will then get them classified, which is a separate activity. While they are waiting for classification, we will try to direct them into a swimming club that is local to wherever they live, and then really that is the first rung of the pathway. What are the selection criteria? We are looking for the athlete to be able to swim in three paces, which is basically slow, medium and fast. If they are more able, we might ask them to do it on several strokes, and if they are less able then just on back strokes, because that is all they might be able to do. So we do have higher expectations of the more able swimmers that they might get to do it on two or even possibly three strokes. So there is an assumption that they can already swim and they are already safe in the water and they have some skill – although it might be a very basic skill. That first talent sort of day is the same, whether it is in England, Wales or Scotland [...] In Scotland we are looking to run eight talent days and we would

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hope to get five or six swimmers coming along to each day. In England we are looking in this year, in 2010, we are looking to run 50 talent days because we have got the links with the schools and we could get up to ten or fifteen swimmers at those days. So we could be looking at five hundred people coming along to these days in England. In Wales they are looking to run eight talent days throughout the year. They ran one a few weeks ago and they had four people turning up. So again in Wales they haven’t got the close links with schools; the links are just in England. All we can say is if you develop the links with the schools, then you get better support than if you haven’t. (UKC4)

The Talent Intro Days organised by UK Athletics are clearly focused on talent identification. On their very first appearance, newcomers are classified by the organisers and their development potential is assessed:

We do a talent intro day, which literally is a ‘come and try it day’ to see if anybody is interested. When people come along, we give them a classification with our national panel and they initially just come in handfuls and we’ve got paid coaches and we’ll just have a look to see if any of them has what is essential. And if they do, we get back to them, so that we can see them yet again. (UKO3)

In addition, senior officials of UK Athletics reported their positive experience with the Parallel Success programme, in which school sports teachers referred talented pupils both with and without disabilities to contact persons in sports federations, thus establishing a first contact. Although sports teachers were not usually authorised to identify new talent for various sports themselves (and this applied in particular to children with disabilities), they possessed the necessary information to be able to recommend pupils with an enthusiasm for sport to the relevant institutions so that they could undergo development:

Parallel Success is a school-based programme to recruit and activate kids in school and it is sponsored by the teachers’ union. So the teachers’ union then gets all of this information, and it spreads around the school. The teachers have the awareness. And therefore we reach those kids which we would regularly not reach otherwise. The teachers are not qualified even for the basics when it comes down to even physical activity for any of the schools. And it even gets worse when it comes down to the Paralympic side, but at least they have the opportunity to and the information to direct them to the right source. That is what is needed more than anything else. (UKC1)

A British athlete who had lived in Canada for many years and thus could draw comparisons between the two countries likewise emphasised the importance of cooperating with schools in indentifying talent, which in her view worked very successfully in the UK:

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I think what the UK is doing is really, really neat. They have what’s called ‘talent identification days’, so obviously the best way to procure any of the kids is to go directly to the schools. And they are going to these schools and they are having fun track meets where it’s easy to look. You just look down the results and see, ‘You know what, you’re pretty good. Let’s take you on.’ In Canada there is this organisation which I used to be a part of called ‘The War Amputees of Canada’, and so what they do is any new amputee, any child amputee, they’d invite them out to these seminar camp weekends, which is fun. I’ve been to some of them; I’ve been a counsellor there. I’ve seen 400 plus kids running around just in southern Ontario. But one of the biggest problems is that, officially, there aren’t any competitive amputees in Canada. But they’re there, I’ve seen them. Nobody’s recruiting them because they just, they gotta get out to the schools. That’s your first level, and I think in the UK, they have the right idea for sure – we have to wait to see if it’s gonna work; you’ll know in a couple of years’ time. (UKA3)

The Paralympic Potential Talent Days were mentioned in the expert interviews as a project in which UK Sport, the English Institute of Sport (EIS) and the British Paralympic Association (BPA) cooperated. Launched in the run-up to the Paralympic Games in London in 2012, the project was now going to be continued:

There’s a programme called ‘Paralympic Potential Talent Days’. People come to a university or sports centre or something. It is advertised before. People can book, they have to book, and they then come in. So we get about 50 athletes come down, or people who have not been involved before, so normally people who have not had a chance to play any disability sports. They come down; they do five or six different sports, maybe more – so, for example, archery, swimming, basketball, athletics, rugby, volleyball. Things like that. So they invite all these groups down and then they give you about five slots of about thirty, forty minutes. And they put all the athletes into groups. And then these groups go around trying each sport. We tell the organisation whom we want to see again, and whom we would like to involve in our current programme. And when they come to us, we know that they’ve already been identified as talent, and we can bring them into our programme. So that’s Paralympics GB talent identification. (UKO9)

One interview partner brought up the question of data protection, which had proved to be a great obstacle for sports federations since in their efforts to seek new talent they had to rely on information about where to find people with disabilities. Federations depended on the help of everyone who was in any way involved in disability sport, such as a mother in the following quote:

We have the governing bodies, whose responsibility is to identify the young people. The problem they had was all this confidentiality and so on. They were not

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able to go to a local authority and say, ‘Tell us where the young disabled people are!’ because on registers they are just a name. They do not, their disabilities are not there, quite rightly […] But we found ways around that. We have parents who’ve got databases of other parents. For example in Cumbria we have one of the basketball players’ mums; she has got a database of 6,000 parents in Cumbria. So if there’s an event coming up, we just send it to her and she sends it to all the parents. So we got around it that way. And I’ve always said: once you get young people to an event, you’ve made it. We have many games – which is usually five to eleven-year-olds. If we get them away for three days having a great time, they’re in sports for life. (UKO6)

Other interviewees, too, mentioned the topic of data protection, but in contrast to the quotation above they reported that they were able – perhaps in a roundabout way – to make use of some database with information about persons with a disability. According to one official, all local authorities in the UK had access to a database with information on children and adolescents with disabilities and which schools they attended, etc. And in cases in which families applied for social benefits for their children with a disability, the authorities had detailed knowledge, for example, of the specific type of disablement. Although sports federations had no direct access to these databases on grounds of data protection, they were able to get into contact with their target group through the disability officer of the local authority in which they wished to recruit new talent:

All the local authorities, each region has a database of all the disabled athletes, so they know where they are, which schools they’re in […] If someone applies for benefits, then straight away, they have their details on record, then they have family details. I suppose when they ask for child benefits, then they would give details of disabilities and so on. And even schools, when schools complete their register for the local authority, they would say, you know, the disability that each pupil may have whether it’s learning disability, physical, visual, auditory, whatever it might be, complete details. Once they have those, they know exactly who’s in those schools and where those kids are. The local authority has a disability officer. Now we can approach the disability officer. We can say that if we want to run this programme, we want to run wheelchair basketball; we want to include more people. That disability officer can then contact those people. So they can contact those people and say, ‘There’s this programme at this club or this organisation. Would you like to get involved?’ And they come down and help and the local authority can help us to recruit new people – we just can’t directly. (UKO9)

The USA

The Paralympic Sport Clubs, established by a programme in which a total of 120 clubs were founded all over the country within three years, were named by US-American experts as

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playing an important role in connection with the recruitment of new talent:

The Paralympic Sport Club programme is the entity that coordinates the sport activity in a community. And it doesn’t mean that they provide all of the training and all of the programmes, but they would direct people who are interested in swimming to a local swim club. They would coordinate that. Or the Paralympic sport club may organise a wheelchair basketball team because there’s no other entity, or they may find a local track club that would accept track athletes with disabilities. So the sport club’s purpose is primarily to coordinate activity in the community, but also to create awareness at the community level, to educate the community on what Paralympic sport is, and also to recruit individuals from the community and get them involved in the different sport programmes. (USO4)

Asked what procedure he would recommend to parents whose child showed an interest in sport, an expert of the National Paralympic Committee (NPC) replied as follows:

Well, the easiest way to get involved is if there is a Paralympic sport club in the community that we can direct the individual to. If there isn’t a Paralympic sport club, we will work with that family to try to find them opportunities in their community. For instance, if they have an interest in swimming, we will try to work with a swim club in that community. Even if the person does not have quite the skill level yet, if there is no other programme to acquire the basic skills, then we will try to indentify a swim club, and work with that club in explaining the situation for this individual, and they may get them more involved in a more basic swim programme than they normally would if they need to develop basic skills. We work with schools and rely very heavily on our Paralympic sport clubs and other community programmes to do a lot of work finding the young kids and getting them involved. You know, additionally, we are in the process of developing what we call an athlete assessment tool. It’s a simple set of skills, or physical skill testing, that we implemented or administered – about five hundred tests in 2009 at different camps and clinics and programmes, and it’s a series of tests that measure strength, speed and quickness, and those types of things. (USO4)

US Paralympics, with its network of Paralympic Sport Clubs, was portrayed in the interviews with the US officials, on the one hand, as the central point of referral for getting people interested in sport to actually take up a sport. On the other hand, it was important for those interviewed to stress their role in systematically identifying talent by means of scientific test procedures.

In addition, in order to recruit children and adolescents for Paralympic sport in particular, the initiative Paralympic Experience was founded, an ‘open day’ for children with a disability to come with their parents to try out different sports. Just like their Canadian counterparts, the

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US experts highlighted the relevance of getting to know the parents. Especially through personal contact with the Paralympic athletes who are present at these ‘open days’ and share stories of their experiences in sport with the visitors, it is hoped that the fears of overcautious parents can be allayed:

We have created a programme called ‘Paralympic Experience’. And it’s a one-day activity that can be administered in any community. All of our Paralympic sport clubs do at least one of these ‘Paralympic Experiences’ each year and it’s an event that’s widely promoted in the community through the schools. And it’s designed to recruit and encourage young people with physical disabilities who have not been involved in sport to come out for a day, and we encourage them to bring their parents, and generally there are three or four sports that are offered that the young people can try. And then we have generally a session for the parents, so they can sit down with a Paralympic athlete, they can talk about the important role that parents play in the process, the importance of letting your children be children and not being overprotective because they have a disability, and that type of thing. (USO4)

Apart from US Paralympics there is a second central organisation, Disability Sports USA (DSUSA), one of whose tasks is defined as facilitating access to sport for people with disabilities and informing them about the various ways and opportunities of taking up a sport:

We are working with those two major organisations, Disability Sport USA and US Paralympics. We are trying to get the information in the proper streamline so if an athlete wants to come into sports, they can get involved in sport through DSUSA; if they want to compete in sport, they can get involved with US Paralympics. (USC1)

Whereas, at the level of the US officials, there was much praise expressed in the interviews for the system as it existed at present, coaches and athletes were less convinced that conditions were ideal. Several US coaches we interviewed felt that they received little support from these umbrella organisations:

In the United States, not everywhere do you ski, so it’s very limited on where those opportunities exist. And most of those opportunities that do exist, they’re all Alpine skiing. I’d say maybe three or four learn-to-ski programmes in this country provide cross-country skiing experience […] It happens during the season but they’re not, like, promoting the programme. If you show up and you wanna learn how to cross-country ski, they might be able to provide you with that opportunity […] They would only know it if they googled that opportunity. They don’t know. There’s no awareness. So, normally, nobody is coming […] The most recent athletes came from the military, and they find out that this programme exists. We have been pretty successful in 2007; I think we had 13 World Cup

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podiums and now we’re way down […] There are the ‘Warrior Games’. It’s military veterans doing sport but all of those sports are summer sports. And there hasn’t been an opportunity for someone like myself to go in and promote a winter sport – so there is opportunity, but it’s not in my direction as far as winter sport. (USC2)

The athletes’ view of the situation in the area of Nordic skiing was rather similar:

I know for certain that in Alpine skiing it’s a little bit different. And that is that Alpine skiing has definitely been sort of the traditional Paralympic winter sport. It gets a lot of exposure. There are a lot of programmes around the country; so that is definitely a challenge that cross-country skiing has. First of all, compared to Alpine skiing, cross-country skiing is not a very ‘sexy’ sport, certainly not in the US. And there are no programmes, so you as an athlete, or you as a non-athlete, can’t really get exposure to cross-country skiing. Versus with Alpine skiing, you can go to probably 10 different programmes in California, five or six different programmes in Utah, another five or six programmes in Colorado, some programmes on the East Coast. You can find the opportunity to try the equipment. You can go out, you can go have fun. And, you know, Alpine skiing is a much more social sport. (USA2)

A wheelchair basketball coach likewise showed little enthusiasm for the efforts of his federation to recruit talent in a targeted way:

I think what’s happening at the grass-roots level is happening without any focus. I think with focus and support and some strategic plans, we would reach a much higher level, of course. You know, even though I think we’re developing youth at a much higher rate, but that has a lot to do with our population. (USC4)

Most of the athletes reported that they had found their way into sport not so much through the systematic talent identification programmes of US Paralympics or those of sports federations but rather through disability sports organisations like Disability Sports USA and Wheelchair and Ambulatory Sports USA or disability organisations such as Little People of America, which provides support for people with dwarfism, or Aspire, which helps people with spinal cord injuries. It must be added, though, that the Paralympic Sports Clubs programme outlined above was only initiated three years before the interviews took place.

Personal initiatives of the athletes in their socialisation into as well as in sport

Looking back at their sporting careers, the great majority of the athletes interviewed in all three countries surveyed were in agreement that their taking up sport as well as their development in sport were attributable either to their own initiative or to the efforts of their parents rather than the activities of outside agencies. The following are a selection of quotations from athletes in all three countries which indicate that the internet in particular

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represents an important source of information:

I went on the internet, started looking up, you know, following links from here to there to the other places, trying to find the information and finally I got a name and a number. I did most of this research kind of on my own. My parents supported me in it, tried to figure out what was going on, but I did most. I went on the internet and tried to figure out who I had to talk to. […] I guess it was Athens that really inspired me […] And during all that research I kind of learned a little about the Paralympics, too. So I contacted someone at the national governing body, Cross Country Canada, and gave them my results and they said, ‘Well, that’s quite impressive. You go to a development camp, an IPC development camp in Norway. (CAA4)

But I first found out about classification. Actually I found out about it on my own, like I said, I kind of did an internet search. I mean, in the back of my mind I was kind of aware, I guess, of competitive opportunities; and then when I started actually training, I started to do a little bit more research and I found out about the Ontario Amputee Sports Association. So I sent them an email and said, ‘Hey, I’m a runner. I’m just wondering what opportunities there are available.’ And so they were really excited and really receptive and they actually called me right away; and there was a meet that was going to happen in, like, three weeks from that time and they asked if I wanted to compete in it. So I ended up competing in the 100 metres and the 800 metres, which doesn’t make any sense really. But that is what I wanted to do. So they came to my house, they picked me up, and they drove me there. They took me around and introduced me to everybody and kind of got me acquainted with the whole Paralympic track-and-field sports. So that was the first time I kind of realised, ‘Oh! This is actually kind of competitive.’ I mean, they were highly motivated individuals who had absolutely nothing available and had to kind of crop everything up from scratch. (UKA3)

Well, there were organisations out there. There was one called the Back of Trust and they are a charity group organised to look after people with spinal cord injuries and get them back into sort of activity. [...] It was on the web. I think there may have been a poster on the wall, but it was my initiative to get back into it. They did not come to me. Oh, I think, back up, actually, I think one of my hospitals did a little presentation. So I knew that they were there and that there were some possibilities. (UKA2)

In several cases the athletes owed their first participation in (high-performance) sports to their parents’ endeavours:

There was a coach who was coaching an able-bodied team, in the area, in the Calgary area, not my team, and I guess he was coaching the Alberta disabled

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team at the time, but my father had approached him and said, ‘Look, my daughter, there she is. She’s got cerebral palsy. Look, she’s a good skier; she’s beating able-bodied girls. Don’t you want her on your team?’ And he later coached me on the national team. He was a much disorganised man (laughs). And so, my father had to go to him and be, like, ‘Look! There she is! Take her!’ And he wasn’t organised enough to do it. (CAA9)

When I got talent spotted by UK Athletics, right, my mum was tasked with the job of finding me a coach. And she phoned up the university and spoke to their head coach there, right? It was the nearest local facility to us, basically. So she phoned them up, and said, ‘Can I speak to the head coach please?’ And my mum described it very well. She said that she spoke to the head coach; everything was very well in the conversation until the head coach learned that I was disabled. (UKA1)

It emerged from the interviews that many of the athletes had quite similar personalities inasmuch as they often described themselves as being very target-oriented right up to being iron-willed. They seemed to set themselves the task of surmounting any obstacle in order to achieve their aims and fulfil any dreams they had:

I thought, ‘I’m not gonna let someone else tell me what I can do and what I can’t do. I’m gonna go figure that out for myself.’ So I did start doing some running. I didn’t right away because of how my arm was, but a couple of months later I started running. And it hurt my arm to do that at first but it doesn’t very often hurt now. And I thought, ‘Well, I am going to see if I can swim.’ And it turns out I can. It’s not as fast, but I can. And I thought, ‘Well, I'm gonna see if I can ride my bike again.’ And I can, so by the next winter there I thought, ‘I can cross-country ski, I just have to use one pole.’ That was the time when I contacted Cross Country Canada because I hadn’t heard of Para-Nordic skiing, and I thought, ‘If anyone else was skiing with one pole, sure they would know, and they could tell me.’ Well, I emailed them and I said, ‘Do I need any extra information for training? Can you help me out?’ They said, ‘No, just go and ski.’ (CAA6)

That’s kind of how I am. We all [i.e. the members of the national team] found the ski team. The ski team didn’t find us. (USA2)

They have initiatives. I just would say that those initiatives for me did not work out. I kind of never went that way. They’re arguing that they have US Paralympic sport clubs throughout the US and those Paralympic sport clubs offer training and resources and will help them advance along the way. Probably because I’ve been disabled for so long, I don’t really go to those. My husband runs a Paralympic sport club. He runs Salt Lake County Adaptive, and they do clinics, so, like for wheelchair basketball, for quad rugby and all this stuff. They do clinics

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and help cultivate, and they bring coaches out and training, and then we’ll help educate. (USA10)

9.2.6 Evaluation: current challenges and the need for action

At the end of each interview our experts were asked about the greatest challenges facing talent identification and development at the moment. It turned out that there was so much overlapping in the answers given across all three countries that any differentiation is unnecessary at this point. In the following the key aspects are listed which the majority of the members of the three groups regarded as being in urgent need of attention.58

Table 20 Key challenges currently facing talent identification and development according to

the members of the three groups of the sample

Athletes Coaches Officials

No sustainable

talent

identification

system

No sustainable talent

identification system at

grass- roots level

No sustainable

talent

identification

system No sustainable

talent

development

system

No sustainable

talent

development

system

No systematic strategy;

dependent on individual

coaches who are

enthusiastic. Small population of

people with a

disability

Small country & small

population of people with a

disability

Small population of people

with a disability; no exact

data about population (how

many people within the

proper age range within

classifiable disability

groups?) Lack of cooperation

with schools

No talent identification

in schools

Lack of cooperation with schools Lack of cooperation with

schools; Lack of inclusion in

PE

Lack of qualified PE teachers

in integrated schools

58 The order corresponds to the approximate frequency with which the aspects were named.

Issue

What are currently the greatest challenges for talent identification and development?In which areas, accordingly, is an urgent need for action observable?

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Lack of awareness

and education

Lack of awareness and

education (about options

with regard to being

physically active)

No awareness campaign

TID only for athletes

with less severe

disabilities

Neglecting athletes

with more severe

disabilities (current

support system

mainly oriented to

needs of athletes with

less severe disabilities)

Lack of integrated system

Neglecting athletes with

more severe disabilities

Lack of disability-

specific training

clubs/centres for more

severe disabilities

Overprotective parents Parents: lack of education

with regard to options in

sport Lack of funding Lack of funding

Deficient

organis with

overlapping

ational structure Lack of centralised

sport responsibilities system

Lack of coaching

expertise Disadvantages for athletes

with a disability due to the

fact that in the integrated

system, there is no

expertise, no equipment

on the able- bodied side

Lack of specific

disability sport

competitions within

their own country

A lot of athletes are

afraid of participating

in able- bodied events.

Lack of cooperation with

able- bodied sport in order

to find options for

integrating athletes with

disabilities Data protection laws

Top athletes are too old. Top athletes are too old.

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9.3 Results of the online survey

The quantitative part of the study investigated the quality features of talent identification and development programmes in Canada, the UK and the USA. It focused particularly on structural quality, which is mainly determined by four factors: goals, resources, opportunities and obligations (cf. Rütten et al., 2005).

The first step was to accurately measure the quality features of talent identification and development. Hence, ten item batteries were constructed (referring to goals, resources, opportunities, obligations as well as results of talent identification and development respectively) and validated by reliability analysis. Accordingly, internal consistency was investigated with Cronbach’s alpha. Single items were removed in some cases in order to

improve internal consistency of the item battery.59

In a second step regression analysis was used to investigate the effect of the different quality features on the results of talent identification and development. Here, the assumptions that have to be fulfilled in order to obtain reliable results from regression analysis (like a linear relation between dependent and independent variables and inclusion of all relevant variables) are taken to be given. Considering the sufficient number of observations, bias caused by non- normality was not to be expected, and thus tests for normality were omitted.

In a last step quality features of talent identification/development were compared between the countries under investigation.

9.3.1 Reliability analysis

The hypothesis to be tested in reliability analysis is whether each item in a set of questions belongs to the same factor, i.e. is an expression of the same single dimension. This internal consistency is measured by Cronbach’s alpha – the corrected mean correlation between the items under consideration. Hence, it is bound between 0 and 1. When it is closer to one, all items belong to one non-observable factor, which means that they are part of a one- dimensional construct. Correlation, as it is used here, refers to the Bravais-Pearson correlation, which is applicable only to metric variables. Consequently, the initially ordinal values of the items are considered to be manifestations of a latent (non-observable) metric variable. In this sense, the application of Cronbach’s alpha – as a measure of internal consistency – to ordinally scaled variables is justified (cf. Carifio & Perla, 2008; Norman, 2010).

59 Alternatively, principal component and factor analysis are suited to determine internal consistency. They are, however,

prone to error if sample size is low and thus will not be used here (cf. Bortz, 2005).

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The relation of Cronbach’s alpha and internal consistency is displayed in Table 21 (cf. George & Mallery, 2003; Kline, 1999).

Table 21 Interpretation of Cronbach’s alpha

Cronbach’s alpha Internal consistency

α ≥ 0.9 excellent

0.9 >α ≥ 0.8 good

0.8 >α ≥ 0.7 acceptable

0.7 >α ≥ 0.6 questionable

0.6 >α ≥ 0.5 poor

0.5 >α unacceptable

It is useful to investigate what happens to this statistic when one item is removed from the whole set (“leave-one-out” examination). If the value of the statistic gets larger, the item is probably not connected very closely to the other items and should not be considered a part of the concrete set.

Due to the small sample size principal component and factor analysis are not applicable to the data at hand.

9.3.1.1 Talent Identification

Goals of Talent Identification

According to reliability analysis the internal consistency of the questions was acceptable. It could be improved by removing one item (item 7) from the set.

Table 22 Reliability Statistics: Goals of Talent Identification

Reliability Statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.783 11

Table 23 Item-Total Statistics: Goals of Talent Identification

Talent Identification in my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if item 7 deleted

… pursues concrete goals of national governing bodies (NGBs).

.763

… pursues concrete goals of coaches. .762

… has goals that are in written form. .756

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… has goals that are known to all people who are responsible for it.

.757

... has goals laid out for the long term. .763

... targets especially children and young people. .787

... targets exclusively adults who have previous experience in sport.

.794

... selects exclusively people whose classifications are unambiguous.

.752

... targets exclusively people who show talent from the very beginning.

.759

... selects people based on the characteristics of their physical build.

.763

... targets exclusively people who meet appropriate psychological capability.

.765

Item 7 (“targets exclusively adults who have previous experience in sport”) is not necessary to represent the dimension of goals of talent identification. Thus, is has been deleted from the set for the sake of higher internal consistency (alpha = 0.794).

Resources of Talent Identification

Table 24 Reliability Statistics: Resources of Talent Identification

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.831 21

The set of questions had a good internal consistency which could, however, be improved by removing items 17, 19, 20 and 21 (Alpha = 0.853).

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Table 25 Item-Total Statistics: Resources of Talent Identification

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 17,19,20, 21 deleted

… there is a sufficient number of coaches to carry out talent identification. .827

… the coaches responsible for talent identification are qualified. .821

… talent scouts are used. .825

… many coaches at the grass-roots level have coaching licences. .821

… education and training programmes specific to disability sport are offered. .821

… the officials responsible for talent identification are competent. .819

… PE teachers at schools are competent for talent identification. .823

… the physicians and therapists at hospitals/rehabilitation centres are competent for talent identification.

.816

... the available financial resources are sufficient to ensure talent identification. .822

... the available financial resources for talent identification can be counted on for the long term.

.818

... situation for talent identification has improved during the last few years. .824

... the amount of money available for talent identification is fair compared to able-bodied sport.

.819

… talent identification involves cooperation with schools. .820

… talent identification involves cooperation with colleges and universities. .817

… talent identification involves cooperation with hospitals and rehab centres. .828

… there are a lot of disability sports clubs at the grass-roots level. .826

… there are many integrated sports clubs at grass-roots level. .840

… there are many training sites that are accessible for beginner level athletes with disabilities.

.821

… most of the beginner level athletes train together with able-bodied athletes. .831

… beginner level athletes benefit from training with able-bodied athletes. .831

… the needs of beginner athletes are most appropriately met in disability- specific sport groups.

.830

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As before, items 17 (“there are many integrated sports clubs at grass-roots level”), 19 (“most of the beginner level athletes train together with able-bodied athletes”), 20 (“beginner level athletes benefit from training with able-bodied athletes”) and 21 (“the needs of beginner athletes are most appropriately met in disability-specific sport groups”) were removed from the set in order to obtain higher internal consistency (alpha = 0.853).

Opportunities of Talent Identification

Table 26 Reliability Statistics: Opportunities of Talent Identification

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.761 16

The set of questions had an acceptable internal consistency, which could be improved by removing items 3, 8 and 14 (alpha = 0.805).

Table 27 Item-Total Statistics: Opportunities of Talent Identification Cronbach’s

alpha if items 3, 8, 14 deleted

In my country we live in an inclusive society. .737

Most people with disabilities know about the possibilities of being active in sport.

.745

The majority of the population thinks that people with a disability are not able to do sports because of their condition.

.798

Paralympic athletes are perceived as role models in society. .745

Examples of high-performance athletes with a disability encourage many people with a disability to do sports.

.744

Most parents are willing to allow their children to do high-performance sport.

.743

Most parents are happy if their child is identified as being talented. .749

Few parents have anxiety about their child participating in high- performance sport.

.765

For the most part, the school system in our society is integrative. .739

Students with a disability receive good support in their schools PE programmes.

.733

In my sport talent identification cooperates with sport science. .737

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Coaches have access to the most recent scientific insights, which play a role in talent identification.

.738

At the grass-roots level, government promotes my sport. .737

In my sport there are sponsors who subsidise sport for people with a disability at grass-roots level.

.759

In terms of talent identification in my sport, we cooperate with able- bodied sport.

.738

The existence of an integrated national governing body (NGB) is/would be helpful for talent identification. (Choose according to whether your NGB is currently integrated or not.)

.757

In this case only item 14 could have been removed from the set of questions without jeopardizing the construct’s validity. This, however, would have worsened internal consistency (alpha = 0.759). Hence, the set remains unchanged.

Obligations of Talent Identification

Table 28 Reliability Statistics: Obligations of Talent Identification

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.805 18

The item battery’s internal consistency was good and could be improved successively by removing items 12, 13, 11 and 9 (alpha = 0.871). Each of these items, when removed, already led to a slight improvement in Cronbach’s alpha.

Table 29 Item-Total Statistics: Obligations of Talent Identification

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 12, 13, 11, 9 deleted

... talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB. .781

... there is a standardised sustainable pathway for talent identification. .778

... there are centralised procedures in talent identification that are used to spot and select talent.

.774

... the NGB sets fixed selection criteria. .782

... talent identification is too centrally regulated by the NGB. .794

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... the NGB requires that talent search days are offered on a regular basis. .786

… the NGB designates that club coaches are the ones who mostly carry out talent identification.

.790

... the NGB designates that talent identification is mostly carried out by coaches on a national and/or regional level.

.787

… athletes are selected via the personal impressions of club coaches. .808

… athletes are selected via the personal impressions of regional and/or national coaches.

.798

… talent identification is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches.

.817

… most of the athletes are introduced to sport by coincidence. .825

... most athletes’ introduction to sport is based more on their own initiative or their parents’ initiative than it is on the initiatives of the NGB, coaches, etc.

.823

… the NGB requires that the results of talent identification are in written form. .795

… there are clear national criteria for classifying athletes. .788

… there are clear international criteria for classifying athletes. .797

… national and international criteria for classifying athletes correspond with each other.

.798

… the talent identification process already includes classification. .783

In order to improve internal consistency, the removal of the items mentioned above (9: “athletes are selected via the personal impressions of club coaches”, 11: “talent identification is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches”, 12: “most of the athletes are introduced to sport by coincidence” and 13: “most athletes’ introduction to sport is based more on their own initiative or their parents’ initiative than it is on the initiatives of the NGB, coaches, etc.”) was considered justified. Hence, Cronbach’s alpha of the newly created scale was 0.871.

Results of Talent Identification

Table 30 Reliability Statistics: Results of Talent Identification

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.750 10

The scale had an acceptable internal consistency, which could be improved by removing items 2, 3 and 4.

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Table 31 Item-Total Statistics: Results of Talent Identification

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 2, 3, 4 deleted

… a sufficient number of athletes are identified. .725

… more adult athletes than young athletes are identified. .776

… mostly adult athletes with an acquired disability are identified. .762

… athletes with an acquired disability are only identified if they have prior experience in sport.

.766

… a sufficient number of children and adolescents are identified. .723

… talent identification is considerate so that there is a balanced ratio of different kinds of disabilities.

.712

… effort and output of talent development are in a reasonable proportion to each other.

.700

… the targeted goals of talent identification are reached. .693

… we are successful in international high-performance sport due to effective and efficient talent identification.

.703

... only a few athletes drop out of the talent identification process. .718

It was considered reasonable to remove items 2 (“more adult athletes than young athletes are identified”), 3 (“mostly adult athletes with an acquired disability are identified”) and 4 (“athletes with an acquired disability are only identified if they have prior experience in sport”). The new alpha was 0.851. The removal of these items led to an improvement of internal consistency from acceptable to good.

9.3.1.2 Talent Development

Goals of Talent Development

Table 32 Reliability Statistics: Goals of Talent Development

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.862 9

The item battery measuring the goals of talent development had a very high internal consistency (alpha= 0.862). Removal of items 7, 8 and 9 led to an increase in internal consistency to alpha = 0.903.

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Table 33 Item-Total Statistics: Goals of Talent Development

Talent development in my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 7, 8, 9 deleted

... pursues concrete goals of national governing bodies (NGBs). .839

... pursues concrete goals of coaches. .838

... has goals that are in written form. .833

... has goals that are known to all the athletes. .838

... has goals that are laid out for the long term. .840

... supports as many talented athletes as possible. .846

... supports exclusively the most talented athletes. .878

... selects exclusively athletes whose classifications are unambiguous. .859

... supports exclusively athletes who are psychologically capable of doing high- performance sport.

.847

As before, in order to improve internal consistency, the removal of items 7 (“supports exclusively the most talented athletes”), 8 (“selects exclusively athletes whose classifications are unambiguous”) and 9 (“supports exclusively athletes who are psychologically capable of doing high-performance sport”) seemed justified (alpha = 0.903). By deleting these items, internal consistency was enhanced from good to excellent.

Resources of Talent Development

Table 34 Reliability Statistics: Resources of Talent Development

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.931 26

The scale’s internal consistency was excellent. By removing items 14, 19 and 17 it could be improved further (alpha = 0.941).

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Table 35 Item-Total Statistics: Resources of Talent Development

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 14, 19, 17 deleted

... there is a sufficient number of full-time coaches in talent development. .930

… the coaches responsible for talent development are competent. .929

… the officials in talent development are competent. .931

... the available financial resources are sufficient to ensure talent development. .927

... the available financial resources for talent development can be counted on for the long term.

.928

... the financial situation of talent development has improved during the last few years.

.929

... the amount of money available for talent development is fair compared to able- bodied sport.

.929

... there are many training sites that are accessible for high-performance athletes with a disability.

.929

... the quality of the training sites is good. .931

... there are many regional/national training centres. .928

... high-performance athletes with a disability have equal access to training centres that are also open to athletes with.

.929

... most of the high-performance athletes train together with able-bodied athletes. .929

... the high-performance athletes benefit from training together with able-bodied athletes.

.931

... the needs of high-performance athletes with a disability are best met in disability-specific training groups.

.936

... a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes. .925

... the quality of the training camps is good. .928

... there is cooperation between talent development and rehabilitation centres/hospitals.

.931

... there is cooperation between talent development and schools. .930

… there is cooperation between talent development and colleges/universities. .935

… medical support services are offered to the athletes. .929

... psychological support services are offered to the athletes. .927

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… physiotherapy services are offered to the athletes. .926

… nutritional consultation is offered to the athletes. .926

… services in performance testing are offered to the athletes (e. g. lactate profile test).

.927

… the quality of the five elite performance services mentioned above is good. .925

... the athletes are offered supportive ways to make their work/education and high-performance sport compatible

.926

In order not to jeopardise the construct’s validity, it only made sense to remove item 14 (“the needs of high-performance athletes with a disability are best met in disability-specific training groups”). The alpha of the newly created scale was 0.936.

Opportunities of Talent Development

Table 36 Reliability Statistics: Opportunities of Talent Development

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.704 10

The item battery for the opportunities of talent development had an acceptable internal consistency. It could be improved by removing item 3 (alpha = 0.715).

Table 37 Item-Total Statistics: Opportunities of Talent Development Cronbach’s

alpha if item 3 deleted

In my sport talent development cooperates with sport science. .688

Coaches have access to the most recent scientific insights, which play a role in talent development.

.686

At the elite level government promotes my sport. .715

In my sport there are sponsors who subsidise people with a disability at an elite level.

.671

In terms of talent development, my sport cooperates with able-bodied sport. .650

The existence of an integrated national governing body (NGB) is /would be helpful for talent development.

.659

Most parents are willing to support their child in high-performance sport. .677

Most parents value the coaches’ work. .692

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Most parents lack the financial resources to support their child’s high- performance sport.

.681

Young athletes with a disability receive good support in their school’s physical education programmes.

.688

With an internal consistency of alpha = 0.715 the item battery without item 3 (“At the elite level government promotes my sport”) sufficiently represented the opportunity dimension of talent development.

Obligations of Talent Development

Table 38 Reliability Statistics: Obligations of Talent Development

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.751 13

The scale’s internal consistency was acceptable. With the removal of items 11, 10, 12, 8, 9 and 6 it could be further improved (alpha = 0.856).

Table 39 Item-Total Statistics: Obligations of Talent Development

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha if items 11, 10, 12, 8, 9, 6 deleted

... talent development is systematically planned by the NGB. .710

... there is a standardised sustainable pathway for talent development. .717

... measures of talent development are centrally predetermined by the NGB. .705

... the NGB sets fixed selection criteria. .715

... talent development is too centrally regulated by the NGB. .710

... the NGB designates that club coaches are the ones who mostly carry out talent development.

.719

… the NGB designates that talent development is mostly carried out by coaches on a national and/or regional level.

.726

… decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by club coaches.

.751

… decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by regional/national coaches.

.733

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… talent development is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches.

.777

… the advancement of most of the elite athletes often happens coincidentally. .789

… only squad athletes receive optimal support. .765

… the NGB requires that the results of talent development are in written form. .716

Since removal of items 6 (“the NGB designates that club coaches are the ones who mostly carry out talent development”), 8 (“decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by club coaches”), 9 (“decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by regional/national coaches”), 10 (“talent development is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches”), 11 (“the advancement of most of the elite athletes often happens coincidentally”) and 12 (“only squad athletes receive optimal support”) was assumed not to affect the item battery’s validity, they were deleted from the scale (alpha = 0.856). This led to an increase in internal consistency from acceptable to good.

Results of Talent Development

The scale’s internal consistency was good (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.857). It could not be improved by removing any item.

Table 40 Reliability Statistics: Results of Talent Development

Reliability statistics

Cronbach’s alpha Number of items

.857 6

Table 41 Item-Total Statistics: Results of Talent Development

In my sport … Cronbach’s alpha

... a sufficient number of athletes are supported. .849

... talent development is considerate so that there is a balanced ratio of different kinds of disabilities.

.849

... effort and output of talent development are in a reasonable proportion to each other.

.814

… the targeted goals in talent development are reached. .812

... we are successful in international high-performance sport due to effective and efficient talent development.

.823

... only a few athletes in the development process drop out of it. .847

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The mean was taken over the items assigned to one dimension by reliability analysis. This value is taken to be the measure of the respective quality feature for each person interviewed. This is a definitional approach. It follows Rütten et al. (2005), who, in their study of the quality features of talent identification, selection and development in Olympic sports, also analysed the assignment of single items to the dimensions in question. By taking the average, each question has the same weight – there is no particular weighting scheme. Alternatively, the total score for the respective questions could have been determined. The mean, however, has the advantage of projecting the range of the scale to the questions’ original range. Hence, interpretations do not change.

9.3.2 Regression analysis

In the following, possible impact factors on the metrical scale variables Identification Result and Development Result obtained by reliability analysis are investigated.

With help of regression analysis the quality features were identified which significantly influenced the results of talent identification and development respectively. Additionally, the inclusion of dummy variables in the regression aimed at identifying potential differences between Canada, the USA and the UK.

9.3.2.1 Results of Talent Identification (Identification Result)

In a first step the Identification Result was analysed as the dependent variable. The object was to determine country-specific effects by including dummy variables. In this case dummy variables for the USA and the UK served as the regressors while Canada constituted the reference category. Country-specific differences regarding the dependent variable could be determined by taking into consideration the dummy variables’ regression coefficients. With less than 1%, the model’s explanatory power was very low (cf. Table 42).

In a second step regression analysis was used to investigate the effect of the different quality features on the results of talent identification and development. Here, the assumptions that have to be fulfilled in order to obtain reliable results from regression analysis (e.g. the linearity of the relation between dependent and independent variables and the inclusion of all relevant variables) are taken to be given. On account of the sufficient number of observations, bias caused by non-normality was not to be expected, and thus tests for normality were omitted.

Table 42 Model Summary: “Identification Result” I

Model R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 .167a .028 .005 .79702

a. Independent variables: (constant), UK, USA

b. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

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In this model the constant denotes the mean value of the Identification Result for Canada. The high p values of the variables “USA” and “UK” in Table 43 suggest that there is no significant difference between the countries regarding the dependent variable Identification Result.

Table 43 Coefficients: “Identification Result” I

g.

In the following, additional potential independent variables were included in the regression. As can be seen in Table 44, this led to a considerable improvement of the model’s explanatory power. The percentage of variance explained by the model increased to about 50%.

Table 44 Model Summary: “Identification Result” (extended model) II

Model

R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 . 736a .542 .507 .56410

a. Independent variables: (constant), IDENTIFICATION_OBLIG, UK, IDENTIFICATION_OPP, USA, IDENTIFICATION_GOALS, IDENTIFICATION_RES

b. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

Coefficients of the extended model are displayed in Table 45. Country-specific effects remained insignificant. The effects of the newly included variables were insignificant as well, except for the variable Identification Resources, which had a positive significant effect.

Table 45 Coefficients: “Identification Result” (extended model) II

g.

Model Non-standardised coefficients Standardised T Si

coefficients

Regression coefficient B

Standard Beta error

(Constant) 3.232 .141 22.937 .0

00

USA .096 .201 .058 . 479 .6

33

UK -.235 .215 -.132

- 1.093 .2

77

Model Non-standardised Standardised T Si coefficients coefficients

Regression coefficient B

Standard Beta error

(constant) -.077 .396 - .194 .8

47

USA -.245 .155 -.147

- 1.578 .1

18

UK -.077 .161 -.042

- .476 .6

35

IDENTIFICATION_GOALS -.020 .124 -.016

- .164 .8

70

IDENTIFICATION_RES .657 .162 .505 4.059 .0

00

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IDENTIFICATION_OPP .245 .179 .142 1.371 .174

IDENTIFICATION_OBLIG .258 .147 .211 1.752 .084

a. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

In order to improve the model further, variables were excluded from the above regression stepwise, and the particular models were compared with each other. This was achieved by means of the F test. The variable with the least explanatory power was excluded first, followed by the variable with the second to least explanatory power, etc. Only variables with a significant effect were kept. This resulted in a model with just one independent variable: Identification Resources. Together with the constant it explains 49.7% of the dependent variable’s variability. This analysis led to the conclusion that the excluded variables could not significantly increase the model’s explanatory power.

Table 46 Model Summary: “Identification Result” (improved model) III

Model

R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 .709a

.503 .497 .56979

a. Independent variables: (constant), IDENTIFICATION_RES

b. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

Table 47 Coefficients: “Identification Result” (improved model) III

g.

The regression coefficient in Table 47 can be interpreted as follows: an increase in the variable Identification Resources by one unit led to an expected increase in Identification Result of 0.923 (cf. Table 47). Taking a mean level of the variable Identification Resources, the following value for the variable Identification Result was predicted: 0.279+0.923*3.163=3.198. Table 48 displays the quality features’ mean values.

Model Non-standardised Standardised T Si coefficients coefficients

Regression coefficient B

Standard Beta error

(constant) .279 .323 . 864 .3

90

IDENTIFICATION_RES .923 .100 .709 9.215 .0

00

a. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

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Table 48 Mean Values of the Quality Features

IDENTIFICATION_GOALS 2.7315

IDENTIFICATION_RES 3.1625

IDENTIFICATION_OPP 2.6645

IDENTIFICATION_OBLIG 2.7440

IDENTIFICATION_RESULT 3.2011

The following table (Table 49) contains variables excluded from the model. They show no significant effect on the dependent variable under investigation (Identification Result) when – in addition to the existing smaller model – they are included in the analysis. Hence, it was justified to exclude them from the model.

Table 49 Excluded Variables

Model Beta In T Sig. Partial correlation

Collinearity statistics:

Tolerance

USA -.079b -.990 .325 -.108 .924

UK .026b .318 .751 .035 .928

IDENTIFICATION_GOALS

.087b 1.019 .311 .111 .814

IDENTIFICATION_OPP .136b 1.369 .175 .149 .593

IDENTIFICATION_OBLIG

.177b 1.648 .103 .178 .501

a. Dependent variable: IDENTIFICATION_RESULT

b. Impact variable in model: (constant), IDENTIFICATION_RES

9.3.2.2 Results of Talent Development (Development Result)

In the following the aggregated variable Development Result is investigated. Firstly, as in the preceding section (9.3.2.1), the focus lay on potential country-specific effects.

Table 50 Model Summary: “Development Result” I

Model R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 .324 .105 .082 .80356

The corrected R2 of the current model (0,082) was judged very low. Only 8.2% of the dependent variable’s variability could be explained by country-specific dummy variables. Nonetheless, the variable USA exhibited a significant effect on the dependent variable Development Result. Hence, a significant difference between Canada (reference category) and the USA could be presumed. The constant’s coefficient (2.767) depicts the mean value of

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the Development Result for Canada. Additionally, the USA’s regression coefficient showed the USA to have a 0.587 higher score in Development Result than Canada. The UK’s regression coefficient is not significant. Between the UK and Canada there does not seem to be any difference between evaluations of the results of talent development. Owing to the model’s low explanatory power, however, this result should not be granted too much importance.

Table 51 Coefficients: “Development Result” I

g.

The extension of the model with the variables Development Obligations, Development Opportunities, Development Goals and Development Resources as independent variables led to a rise in its explanatory power to about 60% (cf. corrected R2 = 0.592 in Table 51).

Table 52 Model summary: “Development Result” (extended model) II

Model R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 .789a .622 .592 .53579

The country-specific effect was no longer significant (see Table 52). With regard to the coefficients, only the explanatory variable Development Resources showed a highly significant impact on the dependent variable Development Result.

Table 53 Coefficients: “Development Result” (extended model) II

g.

Model Non-standardised coefficients Standardised T Si

coefficients

Regression coefficient B

Standard Beta error

(constant) 2.767 .147 18.858 .0

00

USA .587 .206 .341 2.853 .0

06

UK .078 .226 .041 . 346 .7

30

a. Dependent variable: DEVELOPMENT_RESULT

Model Non-standardised coefficients Standardised T Si

coefficient

Regression coefficient B

Standard error Beta

(constant) .070 .300 . 233 .8

17

USA -.111 .157 -.064

- .708 .4

81

UK .089 .155 .047 . 576 .5

66

DEVELOPMENT_GOAL .094 .103 .097 . 917 .3

62

DEVELOPMENT_RES .677 .179 .557 3.789 .0

00

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DEVELOPMENT_OPP .140 .164 .099 .854 .396

DEVELOPMENT_OBLIG

.165 .107 .167 1.536 .129

a. Dependent variable: DEVELOPMENT_RESULT

In order to improve the model, regressors with low explanatory power were again gradually removed. As can be seen, here, too, the variable Development Resources contributes most to the explanation of the dependent variable (cf. corrected R2 equals 0.585).

Table 54 Model summary: “Development Result” (improved model) III

Model R R2 Corrected R2 Standard error of the estimate

1 .768a .590 .585 .54020

a. Independent variables: (constant), DEVELOPMENT_RES

b. Dependent variable: DEVELOPMENT_RESULT

Table 55 contains the estimates of the regression analysis. The estimated regression coefficient for the variable Development Resources can be interpreted as follows: a one unit increase in the variable Development Resources leads to an increase in Development Result of 0.934. Prediction can be done with the help of the estimated coefficients (Table 55). Assuming the mean value of the variable Development Resources, a score of 0.379+0.934*2.821=3.014 was calculated for the Development Result. Table 54 displays the quality features’ mean values.

Table 55 Mean values of the quality features

DEVELOPMENT_GOAL 2.5427

DEVELOPMENT_RES 2.8214

DEVELOPMENT_OPP 2.5184

DEVELOPMENT_OBLIG 2.7990

DEVELOPMENT_RESULT 3.0066

Table 56 Estimated coefficients

Model Non-standardised coefficients

Standardised coefficients

T Sig.

Regression coefficient B

Standard error

Beta

(constant) .379 .253

1.497 .138

DEVELOPMENT_RES .934 .087 .768 10.736 .000

a. Dependent variable: DEVELOPMENT_RESULT

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Table 56 contains the variables excluded from the model. The variable Development Obligations would be significant on an alpha level of 10% if it was included in the regression. However, it did not cause any significant change concerning the model’s explanatory power.

Table 57 Excluded variables

Model Beta In T Sig. Partial correlation

Collinearity statistics: Tolerance

USA -.054b -.664 .509 -.074 .784

UK .072b .971 .334 .109 .937

DEVELOPMENT_GOAL .128b 1.373 .174 .153 .579

DEVELOPMENT_OPP .080b .742 .460 .083 .444

DEVELOPMENT_OBLIG .177b 1.799 .076 .198 .513

a. Dependent variable: DEVELOPMENT_RESULT

b. Independent variables in model: (constant), DEVELOPMENT_RES

9.3.3 Comparison of the quality features across countries

In a last step the quality features of talent identification/development were compared between the countries under investigation. Firstly, the mean values for each of the ten quality features were determined. These aggregated data were used to identify whether there were any differences between Canada, the USA and the UK. The countries’ mean values are depicted in the diagrams below. The inclusion of error bars helps to evaluate the variance of the single values in the respective country. Note, however, that the error bars cannot be interpreted as confidence intervals of a statistical test. The bootstrap was used in order to determine

the variances.60

Additionally, the following sections contain diagrams depicting country-specific differences with regard to the response to particular items. The items that are chosen displayed a difference in the descriptive statistics. A tabulation of mean differences of all items can be found in Appendix A.

9.3.3.1 Analysis of the ten quality features’ mean differences

Table 58 shows the country-specific mean values of the ten quality features.

60 Since the assumption of a normally distributed dependent variable in the groups is violated, a common statistical t-test

cannot be applied. Due to low sample sizes an approximation to the normal distribution is not applicable (cf. Fahrmeir,

Künstler, Pigeot & Tutz, 2007).

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Table 58 Country-specific mean values of the quality features Country

Canada USA UK

IDENTIFICATION_GOALS 2.6895 2.6961 2.8377

IDENTIFICATION_RES 3.1411 3.3871 2.8894

IDENTIFICATION_OPP 2.5622 2.8200 2.6000

IDENTIFICATION_OBLIG 2.6020 3.0523 2.5350

IDENTIFICATION_RESULT 3.2317 3.3280 2.9964

DEVELOPMENT_GOAL 2.3054 2.7903 2.5290

DEVELOPMENT_RES 2.6031 3.2322 2.5617

DEVELOPMENT_OPP 2.2992 2.8446 2.3740

DEVELOPMENT_OBLIG 2.5166 3.3187 2.4389

DEVELOPMENT_RESULT 2.7667 3.3538 2.8447

Figures 5 to 15 below contain a visualisation of the mean differences.

Talent Identification

Figure 5 shows that between the countries there are only small differences in the means of the items concerning the goals of talent identification. On average, all three countries hold a slightly positive to neutral position toward the goals of talent identification.

Fig. 5 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning goals of talent identification

As can be seen in Figure 6, the country-specific means for resources of talent identification

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likewise differ only slightly. The three means are all close to the neutral category.

Fig. 6 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning resources of talent identification

Concerning the differences of opportunities of talent identification across countries (Fig. 7), a pattern similar to that of the quality feature above was observed. On average, all three countries hold a slightly positive to neutral position towards the opportunities of talent identification.

Fig. 7 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning opportunities of talent identification

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With regard to the obligations of talent identification, too, all three mean values are close to 3.0 (Fig. 8). The USA differs from Canada and the UK by a slightly elevated score.

Fig. 8 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning obligations of talent

identification

Figure 9 visualises that the means concerning the results of talent identification in Canada, the USA and the UK only marginally differ. The three values slightly vary around 3.0, thus expressing a neutral position.

Fig. 9 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning results of talent identification

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Talent Development

The means of the questions about the goals of talent development likewise only subtly differ across countries. Figure 10 shows that the USA again marginally deviates from Canada. All in all, however, all persons interviewed in the respective countries hold a neutral to slightly affirmative position.

Fig. 10 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning goals of talent development

Concerning the resources of talent development, a pattern similar to that of the goals of talent development is observable (Fig. 11). The countries’ means vary around 3.0.

Fig. 11 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning resources of talent development

The means associated with opportunities of talent development likewise only subtly differ across countries (Fig. 12). They are, however, on average slightly lower than the means

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concerning resources of talent development.

Fig. 12 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning opportunities of talent development

With regard to the means of the questions about obligations of talent development the biggest difference exists between Canada and the USA (Fig. 13). The USA lies closer to category 3 (neutral) while Canada can be considered closer to category 2 (does apply).

Fig. 13 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning obligations of talent development

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to h

As regards the means of the results of talent development, a pattern similar to that of the obligations of talent development is to be seen in Figure 14.

Fig. 14 Comparison of countries: means of items concerning results of talent development

It can be noted that generally there exists a “central tendency” in the respondents’ behaviour. Thus, it is hard to draw any conclusions from outcomes close to the neutral category. It is difficult to determine whether the position taken on a particular question really is neutral or if a bias is caused by this “central tendency” and hence by a reluctance to select extreme choices.

9.3.3.2 Analysis of the differences in the means of interesting items

Following the evaluation of mean differences between the countries with regard to the averaged scales, mean differences of interesting items between the countries are analysed below. In this case the term “interesting” denotes those items whose means differ by a minimum of 1.3 in at least two countries. For the moment, differences of less than 1.3 will not

be considered: for one thing, this restriction is needed in order not UK ave to investigate too

many items; for another, the relevance of differences of less than 1.3 can be questioned. Since this cut-off value is arbitrarily chosen, Appendix A contains a tabulation of the mean differences of all items.

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Obligations of talent identification (1): “In my sport talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB”

With regard to the evaluation of obligations of talent identification (1) – as can be seen in Figure 15 – it is mainly the USA and the UK that differ. Respondents in the UK mostly confirmed that the National Governing Bodies systematically planned talent identification whereas respondents in the USA did not agree. On this question Canadian respondents came closer to the responses of the American respondents than to those of the British respondents.

Fig. 15 Comparison of countries with regard to item (1): “In my sport talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB”

Obligations of talent identification (6): “In my sport the NGB requires that talent search days are offered on a regular basis”

A similar response pattern occurs with regard to the question whether National Governing Bodies require that talent search days are offered on a regular basis (Fig. 16). Again, the biggest difference exists between the USA and the UK. It is striking that Canadian as well as American respondents tended not to agree with the statement while British respondents tended to respond positively to the question whether sports federations required that talent search days be held regularly.

“In my sport talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB”

Canada UK

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UK

Fig. 16 Comparison of countries with regard to item (6): “In my sport the NGB requires that talent search days are offered on a regular basis”

Resources of Talent Development (15): “In my sport a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes”

With regard to the response behaviour to the question whether a sufficient number of training camps is offered on a regular basis, the biggest difference existed between the Canadian and the American respondents (Fig. 17). Canadian respondents tended to agree whereas American respondents tended to affirm that a deficit existed here. The UK’s mean lay about half way between those of Canada and the USA.

Fig. 17 Comparison of countries with regard to item (15): “In my sport a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes”

“In my sport the NGB requires that talent search daysare offered on a regular basis”

“In my sport a sufficient number of training camps isoffered for high-performance athletes”

Canada UK

Canada UK

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Resources of Talent Development (24): “In my sport services in performance testing are offered to the athletes (e. g. lactate profile test)”

Figure 18 shows that the response pattern of Canadian, American and British respondents concerning the offer of performance testing (e.g. lactate profile test) is similar to that of the previous question about the number of training camps for high-performance athletes. Again, the mean value of the Canadian responses denoted agreement whereas the mean of the American responses tended to imply rejection (or at least a neutral stance). The British lay in between the Canadian and the American positions but were more in agreement with the Canadian responses. The largest mean difference was between Canada and the USA.

Fig. 18 Comparison of countries with regard to item (15): “In my sport services in performance testing are offered to the athletes (e. g. lactate profile test)”

Obligations of Talent Development (3) “In my sport measures of talent development are centrally predetermined by the NGB”

With regard to country-specific response behaviour to the question whether measures of talent development are centrally predetermined by the National Governing Bodies (in the context of the obligations of talent development), a similar pattern is to be found to that of the questions presented above with regard to the obligations of talent identification. The biggest difference was between the USA and the UK. Respondents from the UK tended to agree while respondents from the USA tended to disagree. In this case, however, the mean calculated for the Canadian responses came closer to that of the British responses (cf. Fig. 19).

“In my sport services in performance testing are offeredto the athletes (e. g. lactate profile test)”

UK Canada

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Fig. 19 Comparison of countries with regard to Item (3): “In my sport measures of talent development are centrally predetermined by the NGB”

“In my sport measures of talent development arecentrally predetermined by the NGB”

UK Canada

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10 Concluding discussion of the results

10.1 The structures of disability sport in the countries under study – a comparison

The examination of the current structures of the (elite) disability sport systems in the three countries selected reveals parallels between the Canadian and British systems. The sport systems of these two countries are government funded; furthermore, the majority of the national sports federations in the two countries cater for both Olympic and Paralympic sports. At the national level the proportion of integrated federations can be regarded as progressive in comparison. And in both Canada and the UK infrastructural resources at the elite sport level are generally made available to Olympic and Paralympic athletes in equal measure through the Canadian Sports Centres (Canada) and the Institutes of Sport (UK).

Experts in both countries, however, voiced criticism about the fact that the integrative system at the national level, which was commonly found to be exemplary, had so far not been implemented rigorously enough at the levels below. The consequence of this was, among other things, an overlap of responsibilities and ensuing disagreements between sports federations, disability associations and disability sports federations – which in turn were exacerbated by inadequate communication between the organisations concerned. Especially in Canada, however, great efforts seem to be made to remedy poor communication within the system, for example by organising conferences to which officials of all the parties involved are invited.

The US sport system differs fundamentally from those of Canada and the United Kingdom inasmuch as it receives no kind of government funding. Moreover, the extent of integration in US-American elite sports federations is far less advanced. In the interviews the impression emerged that the sport system (including disability sport) was still struggling with the (financial) consequences of its restructuring in 2001, as a result of which the disability sports federations, financially robust up to that point, no longer received any funding from US Paralympics. The status of US Paralympics as a sub-division of US Olympics also led to various areas of responsibility within the disability sport federations being phased out. The discord between senior officials of the various organisations was clearly noticeable in the interviews.

10.2 Quality features of Talent Identification and Talent Development in the three countries

10.2.1 Comparison of aims

As far as implementing a systematic, goal-oriented programme of talent identification and development in individual sports is concerned, Canada appears to be relatively well advanced in a comparison of the three countries. There may have been a certain amount of disagreement in the comments made by our interview partners about the degree to which the national Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) scheme and the supplementary

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programme No Accidental Champion (adapted to disability sports) had been put into practice; nevertheless, there is no question about the fact that swimming has played a pioneering role in this respect for years and can be referred to as an example of good practice. Here, concrete goals had been firmly laid down by coaches for the first two phases of the LTAD scheme (Awareness Raising and First Contact), namely: improving information policy for the benefit of parents; improving general elementary physical training before specialising in a particular sport; setting up a database of athletes from the very first contact with them; expanding coach training; and compiling an online library with examples of different methods to use. Despite an evident lack of formulated goals for a systematic concept of talent identification and development in the majority of Canadian sports federations, it became clear in the interviews that from the point of view of the coaches such a concept existed and was indeed put into practice – even if in most cases this was done largely on the initiative of committed coaches rather than being based on instructions “from above”. Something similar can doubtless be observed in the USA and the UK – even though, generally speaking, the remarks made by our US-American and British interview partners seemed rather vague in comparison.

It must be concluded, though, that at present the formulation – and above all the implementation – of goals largely depends on the work of committed coaches. Whereas a number of coaches took a very clear stance on this issue and provided us with numerous examples of their goal-oriented approach, others (irrespective of country) showed that there was clear need for improvement. In several federations no guiding principles whatsoever have apparently been either formulated or recommended for use. The lack of written goals laid down by the federations may be explained by the fact that across all Paralympic sports, or even generally in disability sport, the fundamental aim of any kind of talent recruitment programme is familiar to everyone concerned: namely, first of all at the basic level to arouse interest and excitement in as many people as possible for sport as well as to motivate them and recruit them in order in the long term to be able to draw on an sufficiently large pool of talent.

10.2.2 Comparison of human resources

The members of our study sample, irrespective of their functions as officials, coaches or athletes, expressed their disapproval of the widespread practice found in most sports of engaging voluntary coaches. Many of them regarded the fact that scarcely any full-time coaches were employed at either the grass-roots or the elite level as being rather retrograde compared with developments in the area of able-bodied sport. The inequality in the remuneration of coaching activities in the two areas of sport, it was said, encouraged even further the existing tendency of coaches to prefer work in able-bodied sports. Positive exceptions, and examples of the full-time employment of the (national) coaching staff, are to be found in the Canadian elite sports federations of Alpine skiing and swimming, which amalgamate (integrative) disability and able-bodied sport at the federation level and remunerate their coaches. A positive side-effect of the full-time employment of coaches is that higher standards of coaching in terms of training and qualifications can be demanded.

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It must be added, though, that, as a result of lucrative sponsorship contracts, the Canadian skiing federation possesses the necessary financial resources to pay its full-time coaches adequately. Few federations have comparable financial resources at their disposal.

The lack of qualified coaches in Paralympic sport was greatly criticised in virtually all the interviews. Many cases were referred to which sports training was supervised by parents or individual athletes for want of an “official” coach. For many of those we interviewed, especially from Canada and the UK, it was common that athletes with a disability trained in an integrative setting. None of the athletes in the study sample reported any fundamental reserve or scepticism about supervising athletes with a disability on the part of coaches coming from able-bodied sport. However, the problem emerged that the higher the performance level of athletes with disabilities, the greater the lack of expertise of coaches was on the specific training of disability sports. Moreover, at these levels coaches were in many cases reluctant to adapt training methods to suit athletes with a disability. Many athletes reported having the feeling that, as Paralympic athletes, they were treated as “second-class athletes” and taken less seriously than their Olympic training partners. Other members of the sample raised the issue that it was precisely in the area of general physical training at the grass-roots level, which they considered so important, as well as in the way athletes with severe disabilities were handled, that the expertise of qualified coaches was lacking.

The necessity of improving information policy for coaches in able-bodied sports was pointed out as an attempt to remedy this. Moreover, in order to remove fundamental inhibitions in contacts with athletes with a disability, all training courses for coaches ought to include compulsory modules on the special demands and methods of disability sport. In addition, federations needed to provide real incentives in order to motivate people to take up coaching in the area of disability, and also Paralympic, sport. One kind of incentive might, for example, be the possibility of faster promotion and an earlier opportunity of working at the international level as a Paralympic sports coach.

In several interviews the exemplary commitment of certain coaches was mentioned who on their own initiative had written training manuals containing information on various forms of disablement, as well as giving examples of training methods in disability sport in order to provide their colleagues from able-bodied sport with the necessary tools for coaching athletes with a disability and also to help them get rid of any inhibitions. This dedication of individual coaches, whose work has paved the way in their countries for Paralympic sport, is undoubtedly to be regarded as exemplary. It also bears witness to the fact that although major developments in Paralympic sport may sometimes be sparked off in the countries under study by landmark decisions taken by federations and higher-level umbrella organisations of sport, it is often the commitment and enthusiasm of certain personalities, above all in the field of coaching, that first makes it possible at all for certain processes of change to be discussed in the federations.

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10.2.3 Comparison of financial resources

With regard to the financial resources that are available in the three countries to federations on the one hand and athletes on the other, it is first of all conspicuous that Canada and the UK have a number of features in common while the sport system in the USA is faced with certain challenges. Both the Canadian and British sport systems benefit from government funding, which allows the allocation of financial support both to federations, according to the number of national squad athletes in their ranks, and to national squad athletes individually. Despite this financial backing, several Canadian athletes criticised the fact that, even at the highest level of support, it was impossible to live on the government allowance alone. As a consequence, it was necessary to find additional sources of income in the form of part-time employment or sponsorship contracts. Seeking sponsors, however, was only – or at least particularly – successful in the case of extrovert personalities. In their interviews, on the other hand, the US-American athletes expressed the view that the financial situation of their Canadian and British counterparts was comparatively comfortable and, accordingly, were quite indignant about their own financial circumstances, which several of our interview partners claimed in some cases amounted to a standard of living not much higher than subsistence level. The ill feeling found among the US athletes we interviewed was exacerbated in a number of cases, moreover, by the fact that from the very beginning US war veterans received comparatively generous financial support for their sporting careers as army personnel.

The criticism voiced in the interviews by British and Canadian experts related to the fixed distribution of resources. The greater part of available funding (around 70 per cent) was channelled into (elite) competitive sport while activities at the grass-roots level (e.g. elementary physical training) were seriously underfunded. According to the critics, this ratio needed to be reversed. The distribution of resources at the high-performance level of sport was likewise clearly defined (70 per cent for elite sport, 30 per cent for development sport), and the coaching staff had no leeway at all in adjusting this ratio. A further point of criticism voiced by Canadian athletes concerned the absence of prize money for winning medals, which they felt to be unfair considering the sometimes huge sums that elite athletes in able-bodied sport were awarded.

In conclusion, the comparison of the three countries reveals the British system to be exemplary with regard to the financial resources available. The officials responsible clearly pursue a same-to-same approach, not only allocating the same monthly allowances to both Olympic and Paralympic athletes but also in no way differentiating between the prize money awarded in able-bodied sport and that awarded in disability sport. Even when a general reduction of government allowances takes place after the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the country, the experts stated emphatically that it was a matter of importance to them that the same-to same approach was continued.

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10.2.4 Comparison of infrastructural resources

Irrespective of function and country, the great majority of our interviewees spoke of the challenges facing targeted talent identification and development programmes as a result of data protection regulations at inclusive mainstream schools. Since special needs schools were now attended only by children and adolescents with severe (multiple) disabilities, it was said, identifying talented pupils with an interest in sport had become far more difficult. Several interview partners, however, described ways and means of making it possible nevertheless to obtain the relevant data and thus contact members of the group targeted through the cooperation of certain institutions or individuals with the corresponding information. Canadian federation officials, for example, have made agreements with provincial governments and the National Paralympic Committee through which they are provided with information about the approximate locations of children and adolescents with disabilities (i.e. the regions in which they live). Based on this information, the federations hold “Give-Them-a- Go” days, especially in sports which require lots of equipment, in order to enthral visitors interested in sport and motivate them to practise sport regularly. In spite of strict legislation on data protection in the UK, too, British federations have created possibilities of obtaining information – through contact with Disability Sport Officers based in various regions of the country – about schools at which it would be worthwhile holding ‘taster’ sessions or days. Here, too, no detailed information (such as names, type of disablement or place of residence) changes hands; instead, an orientation is given which provides sufficient knowledge for federations to offer, as far as possible, ‘tailor-made’ programmes. Beyond these courses of action, there is in Britain a remarkably close cooperation with schools through the activities of Youth Sport Trust and its National Talent ID programme. Putting a strong emphasis on inclusion, this programme is of course aimed at pupils with and without disabilities but is of great help to sports teachers who are completely unfamiliar with the training methods of disability sport. The data of talented pupils identified in the course of the National Talent ID programme is in turn made available to sports federations so that they can take over the further talent development of these young athletes. Among the US study sample, opinions about cooperating with schools on the issue of talent identification and development tended to differ and were sometimes contradictory. It emerged that it was first and foremost the Paralympic Sport Clubs in local communities that made an effort to establish contact with the surrounding schools.

A factor not to be underestimated in the context of talent scouting at schools is the invitation of elite Paralympic athletes to appear as motivational speakers. A great number of the athletes we interviewed in all three countries were active in this area and reported on the success which evidently resulted from the encounter of a school class with a Paralympic competitor. This success is to be seen on two levels: for pupils without a disability it is often the first time that they have ever come into contact with a person with a disability; in conversation they gain an insight into the everyday life of an elite Paralympic athlete and are thus introduced to the subject of disability sport. As a result of the personal contact,

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inhibitions can be reduced, and pupils not infrequently express their respect and admiration for sporting achievements in Paralympic sport. If there are in fact pupils in the class with a disability, motivational speakers hope that they can act as a role model and have an inspiring and motivating effect on those pupils, as well as lowering the barriers which have so far perhaps prevented them from taking up sporting activities. It was pointed out in the interviews that, through their visibility at the Winter Games in Vancouver, Paralympic sport, and thus also disability sport, had been given an enormous boost which it was now essential to build on under all circumstances.

All interviewees agreed unreservedly with the statement that it was important from the very outset to make patients in rehabilitation facilities familiar with the various opportunities of practising sport. This applied, on the one hand, to patients with a newly acquired disablement, who at first felt completely deprived of their possibility to act and move as they had done previously and who could be offered new horizons through physical activity. It was also much easier in rehabilitation facilities, on the other hand, to contact (regularly) patients with congenital disabilities or those with non-acute disabilities later acquired and, for example to form sports teams. The sometimes time-consuming process of gathering contact data – which, as described above, hinders cooperation with schools due to the strict regulation of data protection – is no obstacle in the case of rehabilitation facilities. Sports federations, which seek new talent in these facilities in a targeted fashion, also profit from the support given to them by physiotherapists, who are able, for example, to provide detailed information about the patients’ ability to cope with strain and exertion.

The interviews did not bring to light any conspicuous, country-specific differences with regard to the topic of cooperation with rehabilitation facilities. The great majority of athletes in all three countries reported that during their stays in such facilities they were offered sports programmes from the start, which in some cases paved the way for their later sporting careers.

10.2.5 Comparison of commitments

Our Canadian and British interview partners mentioned a great number of measures and programmes drawn up by either the umbrella organisations of sport or the federations, including individual (integrative) elite federations, for the targeted search and recruitment of talent. Exemplary, and worthy of note in this respect, are the long-standing Canadian programme Bridging the Gap as well as the UK’s Talent Intro Days, its Parallel Success programme and the Paralympic Potential Talent Days launched in the run-up to the 2012 London Games. At the sports federation level recruitment activities appear to be more extensive in the UK, with examples of good practice being cited in the interviews from the areas of Alpine skiing, swimming and athletics. It emerged from the interviews that the existing activities of Canadian sports federations are largely attributable to the extraordinary commitment of individual coaches. A Nordic skiing coach, for example, described in detail the methods employed in his sport to recruit new talent. Thanks to his endeavours, quite

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unconventional measures were not only put into effect but also proved to be successful. A most positive side-effect of the major boost given to the Paralympic Games in Vancouver in 2010 was to be seen in the more intensive networking among national coaches and officials across sports. According to the experts we interviewed, one of the aims of this kind of networking was to exchange information and views on efficient and effective ways and means of identifying and developing talent. Much of the information available was applicable to all kinds of sport, it was said.

With regard to targeted recruitment procedures carried out in the USA, those responsible in the umbrella organisation US Paralympics pointed to the activities of the Paralympic Sport Clubs, which tend, however, to be coordinating agencies, establishing contact between parents and locally based sports clubs, for example. None of the US athletes we interviewed reported having found their way into sport through such clubs; it was instead the ‘have-a-go’ days held by disability sports organisations that triggered their long-term interest in sport.

The athletes of all the sports and countries under study unanimously came to the conclusion that their entry into sport was not primarily due to the kind of recruitment procedures organised by federations but above all owing to their own initiative or that of their parents. It must be noted that, irrespective of their nationality, several of the athletes we interviewed resembled each other quite strikingly with regard to their purposive behaviour and determination, as well as in some cases a combative disposition gradually acquired in the course of their careers through the experience of having to face ever new hurdles. According to their own reports, several of them would never have made it to the top without this disposition.

10.2.6 Comparison of current challenges

The concluding question at the end of each interview about current major challenges facing the process of talent identification and development clarifies two aspects first of all. For one thing, the experts’ opinions in the three countries did not differ on this point as widely as might have been expected from the remarks made beforehand in the interviews. Although there were mainly indications of parallels between Canada and the UK while the USA seemed in comparison to be rather behind the times in some of the issues discussed, these differences finally levelled out in the answers of the three countries’ experts. For another, it became clear that there were many points of agreement in the opinions of all three groups of interviewees, whether officials, coaches or athletes. Thus, it was undisputed that not only efforts towards systematic, country-wide and sustainable talent identification and development must be intensified but also cooperation with schools.

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10.3 Investigation of the quality features of Talent Identification and Talent Development in the three countries

10.3.1 Investigation of the internal consistency of ten item batteries In order to accurately measure the quality features, five item batteries for Talent Identification and five item batteries for Talent Development were developed, referring to the following dimensions: goals, resources, opportunities, obligations, results. Hence, there were in total 10 item batteries, which were validated by reliability analysis. The item batteries’ internal consistency was at least acceptable and could in many cases be increased by excluding single items, which could be justified with regard to contents. In two cases the scales’ internal consistency was excellent (cf. Table 58). Hence, the homogeneity of the (partially newly created) scales is presumed.

Table 58 Internal consistency of the item batteries

Item batteries Cronbach’s alpha Internal consistency

Talent Identification

Goals 0.794 acceptable

Resources 0.853 good

Opportunities 0.759 acceptable

Obligations 0.871 good

Results 0.851 good

Talent Development

Goals 0.903 excellent

Resources 0.936 excellent

Opportunities 0.715 acceptable

Obligations 0.856 good

Results 0.857 good

10.3.2 Explanatory factors of the result of talent identification and development

The investigation of country-specific differences of the dependent variable Identification Result did not show any significant peculiarities. After further potential independent variables had been included in the regression, the effects of almost all newly included variables remained insignificant as well – in addition to the non-existent country-specific effects. Only the variable Identification Resources showed a positive significant effect on the result of the talent identification process (Identification Result).

Accordingly, with regard to talent development, the question about potential country-specific effects on the variable Development Result arose. The variable USA showed a significant impact

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on Development Result. Concerning the comparison across countries, the difference between Canada (reference category) and the USA turned out to be significant; the comparison of Canada and the UK, however, did not show any significant peculiarities. This result, however, owing to the model’s low explanatory power, should not be granted too much importance and hence should be regarded rather as a trend. As in the procedure used for the analysis of Identification Result, the model was then extended by additional explanatory variables. A similar pattern was found to that of talent identification: here, too, no country-specific effects were determined, but the highly significant impact of the explanatory variable Development Resources was found again. As a preliminary result it can be stated that the existence of personal, financial and infrastructural resources is considered crucial by the experts for the quality of results of both talent identification and development.

10.3.3 Comparison of the quality features across countries

For several quality features no statistically significant effect of the countries could be found. The means of the questions about goals, resources, opportunities, obligations and results of talent identification and development only differed slightly across nations. The response behaviour in general tended to be driven by a neutral position, i.e. the means of all countries varied around the neutral category 3.0. The sole but insignificant particularity was that the US experts rate the quality features of talent identification and development almost constantly lower than the British and Canadian respondents and consequently exhibited a lower satisfaction with their system. The question why there was a noticeable ‘central tendency’ in the respondents’ behaviour and whether the position taken on a particular question really was neutral or if it was a matter of bias caused by this ‘central tendency’ – and hence by a reluctance to select extreme choices – cannot be finally answered. This result is not surprising since, among other things, it is consistent with the results of the interview study in which it could be seen in many contexts that the British and Canadian experts rate the quality of their system of talent search and development higher than the US experts. However, it seems here appropriate to recall the low sample sizes in the second sub-study, which scarcely allow any detection of potential significances. A tendency to consistency of the results between the first and the second sub-study (Canada and the UK as groundbreakers in comparison with the USA) could be observed at the item level. These findings will be summarised in the following.

10.3.4 Country-specific differences at the item level

At the item level several interesting peculiarities stand out which on the one hand do not show any statistical relevance but on the other can be perceived as tendencies with regard to existing differences between countries. For five items, differences in means by a minimum of 1.3 in at least two countries were found. In all five cases it was striking, that the US respondents judged the respective aspect lower than the experts from the UK or Canada. For example, the British

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mainly agreed with the statement that the national (elite) sports federations systematically planned talent identification while the Americans obviously did not share the same experience. The Canadian response behaviour came closer to that of the American respondents than that of the British respondents, pointing to a neutral position (i.e. values around 3.0). This confirms key results of the interview study: the initiatives in the field of swimming or Nordic skiing known from the first sub-study seem to have developed through the commitment of individual Canadian coaches rather than having been laid down in federation handbooks and issued as general guidelines. The evaluation of the American respondents, even worse in comparison, likewise mirrors the impression obtained in the interviews of the first sub-study that a comparatively high deficit exists there. A difference similar in size in the response behaviour of British and American respondents was found with regard to the question whether the National Governing Bodies required that talent search days be offered on a regular basis. While the British tended to agree with the statement, the Canadian and Americans tended not to agree – here, the biggest difference existed again between the USA and the UK. Hence, in the eyes of the respondents, the UK evidently does groundbreaking work at the grass-roots level with its systematic approach to talent identification and recruitment. From the perspective of talent development as well, this pioneering role is underlined. On the question whether measures of talent development were centrally decided by the National Governing Bodies, the majority of the British experts again agreed whereas the American respondents mainly negated the question. In this case, however, the mean calculated over the Canadian responses lay closer to the mean over the responses from the UK; hence, the Canadian were also able to report systematic measures of talent development. Thus, it can be stated that the approach to talent identification and development in the UK is seen to be more systematic than those taken by Canada and the USA – with the conditions in the USA being rated worst. While the USA maintained this position in the evaluation of talent development, the Canadian respondents rated the conditions of talent development likewise positive. The British domination continues at the level of talent development; the Canadian position, however, is evaluated as being far more positive at the level of talent development than at the level of talent identification. The assessment of the US respondents is rather negative throughout. With regard to the quality of the infrastructural resources for talent development, a difference between the evaluations of the three countries existed for two items. Here again, the assessment of the Canadian experts turned out to be more positive than that of their British and American counterparts. The Canadians as well as the British agreed with the statement that “a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes”, the mean of the Canadians however being lower, hence indicating stronger agreement. The response behaviour of the Americans differed (clearly) insofar as its mean lay on the other side of the neutral category and

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indicated disagreement. The UK’s mean lay about half way between those of Canada and the USA. With regard to the question whether services in performance testing existed for athletes at the level of talent development, the Canadian and British again tended to agree, whereas the Americans took a neutral or negative position. The British response behaviour lay in between that of the Canadians and Americans but was in closer agreement with the Canadian position. The biggest mean difference occurred again between Canada and the USA. In order to give a clear overview, the key conclusions of the quantitative sub-study are listed as follows:

The internal consistency of the ten item batteries capturing the various quality features of talent identification and development proved throughout to be at least acceptable. Hence, the homogeneity of the scales could be presumed.

The investigation of the country-specific differences of the dependent variable Identification Result did not show any significant peculiarities.

Only the variable Identification Resources showed a positive significant effect on the result of the talent identification process (Identification Result).

The investigation of the country-specific differences of the dependent variable Development Result showed a significant difference between Canada and the USA. This result, however, owing to the model’s low explanatory power, cannot be verified and hence should be regarded rather as a trend.

A highly significant impact of the independent variable Development Resources on the dependent variable Development Result could be found.

Hence, experts judge the existence of personal, financial and infrastructural resources as being crucial for the quality of results of both talent identification and development.

For all quality features no statistically significant country-specific effect could be found. The sole but insignificant particularity was that the US experts rated the quality features of talent identification and development almost constantly lower than the British and Canadian respondents and consequently exhibited a lower satisfaction with their system.

With regard to systematic talent identification at the grass-roots level, the UK seems to hold a pioneering position, followed by Canada in second place and the USA taking third place (far behind Canada).

With regard to (systematic) talent development, the USA again brings up the rear. Canada, however, with respect to a positive evaluation, overtakes England and comes in first place.

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11 Practical recommendations

In the following, recommendations are outlined for practical application (for example in Germany) in optimising the process of talent identification and development in Paralympic sport. It must be pointed out that these recommendations, which result from the findings of both the qualitative and quantitative parts of the study, are based on the experience of experts in three countries and so must be seen in the context of the “social facts” prevailing in those countries;61 in a number of cases they were explicitly formulated by the interviewees. It is not claimed that putting these recommendations into practice will create an efficient system per se; they are to be regarded, rather, as suggestions for changes in practical everyday work.

The watchword to be promulgated by the national umbrella organisation for sport as part of a top-down strategy is that of inclusive sports federations at the national and regional levels. The regional level is to be included from the outset in this transformation process in order to avoid an overlapping of responsibilities and ensuing quarrels between sports federations, disability associations and disability sports federations. In order to counter the opposition to inclusion that is often observed on the part of senior officials in able-bodied sport, the prospect of financial incentives and an enhanced image should be held out for federations as motives for undertaking this transformation. Inclusive settings for training and competitions are to be used so that inhibitions on the part of both coaches and athletes can be reduced and an awareness for inclusion created. Inclusion can only be successful if everyone concerned in able- bodied sport is open-minded about these changes. In order to counter the opposition that is often observed on the part of senior officials in disability sport, it must be made clear by the umbrella organisation that the expertise gained so far is on no account going to be lost; on the contrary, it will continue to be needed in inclusive federations and settings. Likewise, inclusion can only be successful with the expertise of people working in disability sport. In order to promote communication and the exchange of views, experience and information between experts from both areas of sport, it is necessary to create networks and organise meetings and workshops across all sports for the different groups, e.g. officials and coaches, working in these two areas (cf. the Canadian model).

Opportunities for the individual development of (young, talented) athletes with disabilities must be provided in both inclusive and separated settings. The choice of setting must be decided by the individual athlete. Accordingly, the founding of inclusive federations does not automatically entail inclusive training groups per se. However, in

61 Cf. Chapter 6, in which the challenges of international comparative research are discussed

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Practical recommendations

inclusive federations the general structural conditions for athletes with and without disabilities must be equivalent; and this must apply in equal measure to financial, human and infrastructural resources. In an inclusive federation Paralympic athletes must not become “second-class athletes”. All existing infrastructural resources (including, for example, high-performance centres with the respective services they provide) must be available to athletes with and without disabilities alike. Equal financial backing must apply not only to the personal allowance linked to national squad status but also to prize money (cf. the UK model). In the distribution of funding between elite sport and sport for all for people with disabilities a greater proportion must be allocated to sport for all in order to ensure solid and sustainable work in talent development.

• In the area of talent identification and development cooperation between experts from disability and non-disability sport must be promoted in order to meet the requirements of both the specifics of disability and high-performance sport. To make the work of seeking and developing talent at the grass-roots level more efficient and more effective, the following examples of resources are recommended: improving information policy for parents; improving general physical training before specialising in a particular sport; compiling a database of athletes from the very first contact; widening the scope of advanced training for coaches; and setting up an online library containing examples of training methods for coaches from able-bodied sport who do not have the relevant expertise (cf. the Canadian model).

• Irrespective of the sport, compulsory modules on the demands of and methods specific to disability sport must be included in all training programmes for coaches. Parallel to this, a system can be established, linked to the courses of further training obligatory for the renewal of a coaching licence, in which incentives can be offered in a targeted way for coaches taking part in modules on disability sport (for example awarding them twice the usual number of credits). Setting up an online library with examples of training techniques for coaches from able-bodied sport without the relevant expertise can be very helpful in the everyday work of coaches. Federations must generally introduce schemes which provide incentives to encourage coaches to work in the area of disability and Paralympic sport. Such incentives might be, for example, the possibility of faster promotion or the opportunity for Paralympic sports coaches to work at the international level at an earlier stage of their careers. To increase the prestige of coaching work generally, a greater number of coaching positions must be created with a permanent employment contract. With regard to training athletes with severe disabilities, help must be available from experts in the area of disability sport.

• Building networks of coaches across all sports can be extremely useful in implementing systematic procedures of identifying and developing talent. The many successful initiatives of individual coaches, along with their great experience, are

165

Practical recommendations

transferable from one sport to another. The lack of communication between the (national) coaches of different sports, a common problem up to present, can be overcome, for instance, by holding conferences or workshops – as the example of Canada shows. Planning such meetings should ideally be the responsibility of the umbrella organisation.

• Cooperation with schools is a key aspect of talent recruitment. Networking, a topic repeatedly brought up, must be put into practice here, too, and help bring about cooperation, for example, between coaches and teachers. Just as in training programmes for coaches, aspects of disability sport must be covered in general as well as in continuing teacher training. Teachers must, on the one hand, learn how to identify signs of sporting talent and, on the other, know about the structures of support that exist so that they can refer pupils to clubs or federations for competent supervision and development. Last but not least, inviting (top) athletes as motivational speakers is extremely helpful in sensitising pupils to disabilities, reducing their inhibitions and acquainting them with potential role models.

166

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Appendix A: Mean value of all items Talent identification

Goals of talent identification

Talent identification in our sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

… pursues concrete goals of national governing bodies (NGBs). 2.00 2.41 1.95

… pursues concrete goals of coaches. 1.94 2.10 2.45

… has goals that are in written form. 2.55 2.20 2.64

… has goals that are known to all people who are responsible for it. 2.55 2.26 2.41

... has goals laid out for the long term. 2.17 2.27 2.33

... targets especially children and young people. 2.45 2.34 2.04

... selects exclusively people whose classifications are unambiguous. 3.52 3.67 3.90

... targets exclusively people who show talent from the very beginning. 2.97 2.93 3.00

... selects people based on the characteristics of their physical build. 3.43 3.36 3.65

... targets exclusively people who meet appropriate psychological capability. 3.39 3.43 3.90

Resources of talent identification

In our sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

… there is a sufficient number of coaches to carry out talent identification. 3.28 3.39 3.24

… the coaches responsible for talent identification are qualified. 2.30 2.94 2.27

… talent scouts are used. 3.58 3.79 2.95

… many coaches at the grass-roots level have coaching licences. 2.87 2.93 2.73

… education and training programmes specific to disability sport are offered. 2.81 3.23 2.32

… the officials responsible for talent identification are competent. 2.13 3.10 2.09

… PE teachers at schools are competent for talent identification. 3.10 3.07 3.09

… the physicians and therapists at hospitals / rehabilitation centres are competent for talent identification. 3.83 3.90 3.76

... the available financial resources are sufficient to ensure talent identification.

3.27 3.93 3.50

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

... the available financial resources for talent identification can be counted on for the long term.

3.31 3.77 3.23

... the situation for talent identification has improved during the last few years.

3.03 3.77 2.86

... the amount of money available for talent identification is fair compared with able-bodied sport. 2.84 3.55 2.52

… talent identification involves cooperation with schools. 3.83 4.23 3.29

… talent identification involves cooperation with colleges and universities. 3.55 3.16 2.45

… talent identification involves cooperation with hospitals and rehab centres. 3.29 2.67 2.70

… there are a lot of disability sports clubs at the grass-roots level. 2.87 2.80 2.86

… there are many training sites that are accessible for beginner-level athletes with disabilities.

3.50 3.20 3.13

Opportunities of talent identification

Country

Canada USA UK

In my country we live in an inclusive society. 1.94 2.63 2.42

Most people with disabilities know about the possibilities of being active in sport.

2.78 3.32 2.92

The majority of the population thinks that people with a disability are not able to do sports because of their condition. 2.74 2.45 3.08

Paralympic athletes are perceived as role models in society. 2.00 2.26 2.29

Examples of high-performance athletes with a disability encourage many people with a disability to do sports. 1.78 1.87 1.92

Most parents are willing to allow their children to do high-performance sport. 2.60 2.30 2.42

Most parents are happy if their child is identified as being talented. 1.97 1.80 1.79

Few parents have anxiety about their child participating in high-performance sport.

2.97 2.83 2.79

For the most part, the school system in our society is integrative. 2.74 3.03 2.38

Students with a disability receive good support in their schools’ PE programmes.

3.27 3.46 3.41

In my sport talent identification cooperates with sports science. 2.57 3.26 2.39

Coaches have access to the most recent scientific insights which play a role in talent identification. 2.61 3.26 2.78

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

At the grass-roots level, government promotes my sport. 3.09 4.06 3.13

In my sport there are sponsors who subsidise sport for people with a disability at the grass-roots level. 3.16 3.10 2.79

In terms of talent identification in my sport, we cooperate with able-bodied sport.

2.66 3.16 2.92

The existence of an integrated national governing body (NGB) is/would be helpful for talent identification. (Choose according to whether your NGB is currently integrated or not.)

2.10 2.40 2.14

Obligations of talent identification

In our sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

... talent identification is systematically planned by the NGB. 3.07 3.61 2.26

... there is a standardised sustainable pathway for talent identification. 3.03 3.39 2.38

... there are centralised procedures in talent identification that are used to spot and select talent. 3.10 3.48 2.58

... the NGB sets fixed selection criteria. 3.07 3.10 2.43

... talent identification is too centrally regulated by the NGB. 3.39 3.74 3.43

... the NGB requires that talent search days are offered on a regular basis. 3.73 4.00 2.54

… the NGB designates that club coaches are the ones who mostly carry out talent identification.

2.64 2.97 3.27

... the NGB designates that talent identification is mostly carried out by coaches on a national and/or regional level. 2.45 2.77 2.64

… athletes are selected via the personal impressions of regional and/or national coaches.

2.32 2.65 2.52

… the NGB requires that the results of talent identification are in written form.

3.42 3.83 3.18

… there are clear national criteria for classifying athletes. 1.75 2.13 2.04

… there are clear international criteria for classifying athletes. 1.59 1.73 1.83

… national and international criteria for classifying athletes correspond with each other.

1.84 2.21 1.92

… the talent identification process already includes classification. 2.13 2.90 2.46

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

Results of talent identification

In our sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

… a sufficient number of athletes are identified. 3.50 3.32 3.13

… a sufficient number of children and adolescents are identified. 3.39 3.10 2.87

… talent identification is considerate so that there is a balanced ratio of different kinds of disabilities.

3.45 3.37 3.09

… effort and output of talent development are in a reasonable proportion to each other.

2.93 3.37 2.90

… the targeted goals of talent identification are reached. 3.41 3.52 2.95

… we are successful in international high-performance sport due to effective and efficient talent identification. 2.83 3.19 2.87

... only a few athletes drop out of the talent identification process. 3.03 3.32 3.14

Talent development

Goals of talent development

Talent development in my sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

... pursues concrete goals of national governing bodies (NGBs). 2.20 3.10 2.30

... pursues concrete goals of coaches. 2.03 2.50 2.80

... has goals that are in written form. 2.45 2.90 2.23

... has goals that are known to all the athletes. 2.52 2.97 3.00

... has goals that are laid out for the long term. 2.13 2.65 2.14

... supports as many talented athletes as possible. 2.52 2.65 2.68

Resources of talent development

In my sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

... there is a sufficient number of full-time coaches in talent development. 3.48 4.03 3.50

… the coaches responsible for talent development are competent. 2.26 2.58 2.27

… the officials in talent development are competent. 2.59 2.70 2.82

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

... the available financial resources are sufficient to ensure talent development.

3.16 4.10 3.27

... the available financial resources for talent development can be counted on for the long term.

3.40 4.03 3.62

... the financial situation of talent development has improved during the last few years.

2.28 3.27 2.24

... the amount of money available for talent development is fair compared with able-bodied sport. 3.48 4.45 3.40

... there are many training sites that are accessible for high-performance athletes with a disability. 3.03 3.19 2.74

... the quality of the training sites is good. 2.35 2.32 2.22

... there are many regional/national training centres. 2.77 3.55 3.00

... high-performance athletes with a disability have equal access to training centres. 2.58 3.39 2.61

... most of the high-performance athletes train together with able-bodied athletes.

2.74 3.26 2.86

... the high-performance athletes benefit from training together with able-bodied athletes.

2.03 2.39 2.38

... a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes.

2.29 3.55 2.64

... the quality of the training camps is good. 1.74 2.50 2.20

... there is cooperation between talent development and rehabilitation centres/hospitals.

3.33 3.48 3.10

... there is cooperation between talent development and schools. 3.59 3.65 2.95

… there is cooperation between talent development and colleges/universities.

3.79 2.94 2.95

… medical support services are offered to the athletes. 2.00 2.81 1.73

... psychological support services are offered to the athletes. 2.10 3.10 2.18

… physiotherapy services are offered to the athletes. 1.97 3.03 1.87

… nutritional consultation is offered to the athletes. 2.00 3.10 1.95

… services in performance testing are offered to the athletes (e.g. lactate profile test).

1.93 3.23 2.24

… the quality of the five elite performance services mentioned above is good. 1.97 2.93 1.90

... the athletes are offered supportive ways to make their work/education and high-performance sport compatible with each other. 2.43 3.30 2.09

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

Opportunities of talent development

Country

Canada USA UK

In my sport talent development cooperates with sports science. 2.03 2.26 2.26

Coaches have access to the most recent scientific insights which play a role in talent development. 1.90 2.23 2.18

In my sport there are sponsors who subsidise people with a disability at an elite level.

2.90 3.39 3.09

In terms of talent development my sport cooperates with able-bodied sport. 2.38 3.16 2.59

The existence of an integrated national governing body (NGB) is/would be helpful for talent development. 2.13 3.13 2.48

Most parents are willing to support their child in high-performance sport. 2.16 3.24 2.18

Most parents value the coaches’ work. 2.33 2.38 2.23

Most parents lack the financial resources to support their child’s high-performance sport.

2.50 3.21 2.00

Most young athletes with a disability receive good support in their school’s physical education programmes. 2.41 2.59 2.45

Obligations of talent development

In my sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

… talent development is systematically planned by the NGB. 2.43 3.32 2.19

… there is a standardised sustainable pathway for talent development. 2.26 3.35 2.14

… measures of talent development are centrally predetermined by the NGB. 2.50 3.55 2.05

… the NGB sets fixed selection criteria. 2.25 3.00 2.15

… talent development is too centrally regulated by the NGB. 3.15 3.39 3.58

… the NGB designates that talent development is mostly carried out by coaches on a national and/or regional level. 2.21 2.87 2.55

… the NGB requires that the results of talent development are in written form.

2.96 3.41 2.56

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

Results of talent development

In my sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

... a sufficient number of athletes are supported. 3.07 3.71 2.95

... talent development is considerate so that there is a balanced ratio of different kinds of disabilities.

2.83 3.10 3.14

... effort and output of talent development are in a reasonable proportion to each other.

2.83 3.30 2.75

… the targeted goals in talent development are reached. 2.87 3.37 2.68

... we are successful in international high-performance sport due to effective and efficient talent development.

2.47 3.29 2.67

... only a few athletes in the development process drop out of it. 2.50 3.21 2.68

Excluded items

In my sport …

Country

Canada USA UK

... supports exclusively the most talented athletes . 2.71 2.87 2.95

... selects exclusively athletes whose classifications are unambiguous. 3.26 3.23 3.19

... supports exclusively athletes who are psychologically capable of doing high-performance sport.

2.93 3.10 3.41

At the elite level government promotes my sport. 1.97 2.45 2.23

... the NGB designates that club coaches are the ones who mostly carry out talent development.

2.79 2.69 3.33

… decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by club coaches.

2.80 2.47 3.55

… decisions regarding measures in talent development are mainly made by regional/ national coaches.

2.23 2.61 2.40

… talent development is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches.

2.55 2.13 2.95

… the advancement of most of the elite athletes often happens coincidentally.

3.00 2.55 2.95

… only squad athletes receive optimal support. 2.33 2.17 2.20

... targets exclusively adults who have previous experience in sport. 3.00 3.43 3.57

… there are many integrated sports clubs at grass-roots level. 3.28 2.45 3.30

… most of the beginner-level athletes train together with able-bodied athletes.

3.22 2.81 2.91

Appendix A: Mean value of all items

… beginner-level athletes benefit from training with able-bodied athletes. 3.00 3.07 3.00

… the needs of beginner athletes are most appropriately met in disability-specific sports groups.

2.52 2.41 2.74

… athletes are selected via the personal impressions of club coaches. 2.81 2.81 3.17

… talent identification is based less on requirements by the NGB than on the dedication of individual coaches.

2.33 2.65 2.96

… most of the athletes are introduced to sport by coincidence. 2.50 2.63 2.88

... most athletes’ introduction to sport is based more on their own initiative or their parents’ initiative than it is on the initiatives of the NGB, coaches, etc.

2.03 2.06 2.54

… more adult athletes than young athletes are identified. 2.87 3.10 3.39

… mostly adult athletes with an acquired disability are identified. 2.77 3.20 3.24

… athletes with an acquired disability are only identified if they have prior experience in sport.

3.42 3.20 3.91

___________________________________________________________________________________

181

Appendix B: Category system for the qualitative interview study (overarching categories)

Organisational structure of the sport system

o Key organisations

• Responsibilities

• Relationships

• Manpower / staff

• Inclusive NGBs

• General cooperation with able-bodied sport

• Need for action

Financial resources

10 Elite sport

11 Grass-roots level

12 Sponsorships

13 Equity with able-bodied sport

14 Need for action

Coaches

o Employee / volunteer

o Coach for all disabilities

o Cooperation of able-bodied sport and disability sport

• Mindset

• Coach education pathway

• Lack of qualified coaches

• Need for action

Socialisation into sports / grass-roots level

• Disability

• Taking part in recruitment initiatives

• First sport(s)

• Training group

• Encouragement / helpful organisation

• Role of the parents

• Memberships

• Contact with able-bodied athletes

• Cooperation with schools

Appendix B: Category system for the qualitative interview study

• Cooperation with hospitals / rehab centres

• Coaches

• Training site & training frequency

• Knowing about Paralympic Games

• Need for action

Elite sport support environment

o National team

• Number of athletes

• Age structure & disabilities

o Training

• Training site & frequency & camps

o Coaches

o Helpful organisation / encouragement

o Combining education/job and sport

o Memberships

o Contact with able-bodied athletes

o Financial support for elite athletes

• Compared with able-bodied sport

o General support

Compared with able-bodied sport

o Need for action

Role of the military

Disability & Classification

Influence of society

Appendix C: Questionnaire used for the online survey of officials, coaches and athletes (here: athletes’ questionnaire)

1

Dear athlete / coach / official,

We kindly ask for about 20 minutes of your time to take an anonymous online survey. The working

group for Inclusive Education, Physical Activity, and Sport at the Free University Berlin, Germany, is

managing this survey, which the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) also supports.

If you experience a problem accessing or reading the survey, please let us know and we will try to

provide the information in another format.

Purpose of the Study:

We are particularly interested in comprehensive systems of talent identification and development (TID)

in Paralympic sports in Canada, the USA and the UK because some programmes in these countries

are among the only comprehensive TID systems in the world.

We aim to provide a milestone study about TID in Paralympic sport, which is an under-researched

area of study in both academic and popular knowledge.

There is no other way for us to begin to understand TID systems other than asking those who are

involved. Because you live the experience of being part of a comprehensive talent identification and

development programme, your opinions are extremely valuable to us.

Benefits: With this research, we hope to provide further insight into how effective and efficient TID

programmes could better serve Paralympic sports and ensure international cooperation, success, and

higher standards of talent development. If you are interested in getting the final research report of our

study, please send an email to sabine.radtke@fu-berlin.de

Confidentiality: All responses to this survey will be kept anonymous. Your name and identity will not

be linked in any way to your responses. All results from this study will be reported according to the

group of respondents as a whole, not by any individual respondent.

Contact: For questions about the survey, or to discuss any problems or concerns you have related to

it, you can email Dr Sabine Radtke at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, at sabine.radtke@fu-

berlin.de.

Procedure: In order to progress through this survey, please use the following navigation links:

• Click the CONTINUE button to continue to the next page.

• Click the BACK button to return to the previous page.

Please answer the survey questions completely, honestly, and in one session. If you exit the survey

early, your answers won't be saved.

The survey deadline is 15th August, 2011. Thank you very much for your time and help.

2

What is your current primary role / function in disability sport?

(Please choose one role / function on which your answers to the following questions will be based)

Athlete

Coach

Official

What is the country that you represent as an athlete?

Canada

USA

UK

None of these countries

What is your primary sport?

(Please choose only one sport on which your answers to the following questions will be based)

Athletics / Track & Field

Swimming

Wheelchair basketball

Alpine skiing

Nordic skiing / Cross-country skiing

None of these sports

CAN USA UK

I am a carded athlete:

Yes

No

I am a member of the national team squad:

Yes

No

I am an UK athlete in the World Class Performance Programme (WCPP):

Yes

No

3

If the answer is ”yes”:

CAN USA UK

I am ...

a senior carded athlete or

a development carded athlete or

a carded athlete at the provincial level

I am ...

an athlete on the “A” Team

an athlete on the “B” Team

an athlete on the “C” Team

I am ...

a “Podium” level athlete

a “Development” level athlete

a “Talent” level athlete

How did you get into to your main competitive sport? If more than one answer applies, then please

choose only the main one.

Through friends

Through a coach

Through school / teachers

Through physicians / physiotherapists

Through parents

Through siblings

Through talent identification / talent scouting

Other

How did you acquire your disability?

My disability is congenital.

I acquired my disability due to an accident.

I acquired my disability due to an illness.

Other

Please fill in if the way you acquired your disability is not represented above:

4

What kind of disability do you have?

Cerebral palsy

Amputation

Para-/ Tetraplegia

Dwarfism

Visual impairment

Other

Please fill in if your disability is not represented above:

5

PART I: Questions about talent identification

High performance sport is differentiated between a) talent identification and b) talent development.

In our questionnaire, we will follow this differentiation.

The next section of the questionnaire will ask you about the current measures undertaken in talent

identification.

Talent identification refers to measures that contribute to finding people who have the potential to be a

high performance athlete in your sport.

If you cannot make any general statements, please try to remember how your own sporting

career began.

Your answers should be based on the sport you have chosen in the previous section.

6

The first section will ask you questions about the goals of talent identification in the sport you have chosen previously.

Please choose one box for each statement below to show how much it applies or does not apply according to your opinion. If you are not able to answer a specific question, then please choose the 'n/a' box.

Talent identification in my sport…

Applies fully

Applies Neutral Does not

apply

Does not

apply at all

Not applicable

(n/a)

… pursues concrete goals of coaches. … has goals that are in written form. … has goals that are known to all people who are responsible for it. ... has goals laid out for the long term. ... targets especially children and young people. ... targets exclusively adults who have previous experience in sport. ... selects exclusively people whose classifications are unambiguous. ... targets exclusively people who show talent from the very beginning. ... selects people based on the characteristics of their physical build. ... targets exclusively people who meet appropriate psychological capability.

7

Talent Identification

The next sections will ask you questions about the resources of talent identification: personnel,

finances, and infrastructure.

Questions about Personnel

In my sport…

Applies fully

Applies Neutral Does not

apply

Does not

apply at all

Not applicable

(n/a)

…there is a sufficient amount of coaches to carry out talent identification. … the coaches responsible for talent identification are qualified. … talent scouts are used. … many coaches at the grass-roots level have coaching licenses. … education and training programmes specific to disability sport are offered. … the officials responsible for talent identification are competent. … PE teachers at schools are competent for talent identification.

… the physicians and therapists at hospitals / rehabilitation centres are competent for talent identification.

8

Talent Identification

Questions about Financial Resources

In my sport ...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... the available financial

resources are sufficient to

ensure talent identification.

... the available financial

resources for talent

identification can be counted

on for the long term.

... situation for talent

identification has improved

during the last few years.

... the amount of money

available for talent

identification is fair compared

to able-bodied sport.

9

Talent Identification

The next sections will ask you questions about the resources of talent identification: personnel,

finances, and infrastructure.

Questions about Personnel

In my sport…

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

…there is a sufficient amount

of coaches to carry out talent

identification.

… the coaches responsible for

talent identification are

qualified.

… talent scouts are used.

… many coaches at the grass-

roots level have coaching

licenses.

… education and training

programmes specific to

disability sport are offered.

… the officials responsible for

talent identification are

competent.

… PE teachers at schools are

competent for talent

identification.

… the physicians and

therapists at hospitals /

rehabilitation centres are

competent for talent

identification.

10

Talent Identification

Questions about Financial Resources

In my sport ...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... the available financial

resources are sufficient to

ensure talent identification.

... the available financial

resources for talent

identification can be counted

on for the long term.

... situation for talent

identification has improved

during the last few years.

... the amount of money

available for talent

identification is fair compared

to able-bodied sport.

11

Talent Identification

Questions about Infrastructural Resources

In my sport ...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

… talent identification involves

cooperation with schools.

… talent identification involves

cooperation with colleges and

universities.

… talent identification involves

cooperation with hospitals and

rehab centres.

… there are a lot of disability

sports clubs at the grass-roots

level.

… there are many integrated

sports clubs at grass-roots-

level.

… there are many training

sites that are accessible for

beginner level athletes with

disabilities.

… most of the beginner level

athletes train together with

able-bodied athletes.

… beginner level athletes

benefit from training with able-

bodied athletes.

… the needs of beginner

athletes are most

appropriately met in disability-

specific sport groups.

12

Talent Identification

The next section will ask you questions about the general perception of disability sport in society.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

In my country we live in an

inclusive society.

Most people with disabilities

know about the possibilities of

being active in sport.

The majority of the population

thinks that people with a

disability are not able to do

sports because of their

conditions.

Paralympic athletes are

perceived as role models in

society.

Examples of high-performance

athletes with a disability

encourage many people with a

disability to do sports.

13

Talent Identification

The next section will ask you questions about the support from parents and schools.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Most parents are willing to

allow their children to do high-

performance sport.

Most parents are happy if their

child is identified as being

talented.

Few parents have anxiety

about their child participating

in high-performance sport.

For the most part, the school

system in our society is

integrative.

Students with a disability

receive good support in their

schools’ PE programmes.

14

Talent Identification

This section will ask you questions about the support from sport science, government, the economy,

and able-bodied sport.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

In my sport, talent

identification cooperates with

sport science.

Coaches have access to the

most recent scientific insights,

which play a role in talent

identification.

At the grass-roots level,

government promotes my

sport.

In my sport, there are

sponsors who subsidise sport

for people with a disability at

grass-roots-level.

In terms of talent identification

in my sport, we co-operate

with able-bodied sport.

The existence of an integrated

national governing body

(NGB) is/would be helpful for

talent identification. (Choose

according to whether your

NGB is currently integrated or

not.)

15

USA

The following question will ask you about the military initiative WOUNDED WARRIORS.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

WOUNDED WARRIORS is

helpful for talent identification

in my sport.

CAN

The following question will ask you about the military initiative SOLDIER ON.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

SOLDIER ON is helpful for

talent identification in my

sport.

UK

The following question will ask you about the military initiative BATTLE BACK.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

BATTLE BACK is helpful for

talent identification in my

sport.

16

Talent Identification

The next section will ask you questions about the obligations of talent identification in your sport.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... talent identification is

systematically planned by the

NGB.

... there is a standardised

sustainable pathway for talent

identificaiton.

... there are centralised

procedures in talent

identification that are used to

spot and select talent.

... the NGB sets fixed selection

criteria.

... talent identificaiton is too

centrally regulated by the

NGB.

... the NBG requires that talent

search days are offered on a

regular basis.

… the NGB designates that

club coaches are the ones

who mostly carry out talent

identificaiton.

... the NGB designates that

talent identificaiton is mostly

carried out by coaches on a

national and/or regional level.

… athletes are selected via

the personal impressions of

club coaches.

…athletes are selected via the

personal impressions of

regional and/or national

coaches.

17

…talent identificaiton is based

less on requirements by the

NGB than on the dedication of

individual coaches.

… most of the athletes are

introduced to sport by

coincidence.

... most athletes’ introduction

to sport is based more on their

own initiative or their parents’

initiative than it is on the

initiatives of the NGB,

coaches, etc.

… the NGB requires that the

results of talent identification

are in written form.

18

Talent Identification

The next section will ask you questions about the classification process.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

… there are clear national

criteria for classifying athletes.

… there are clear international

criteria for classifying athletes.

… national and international

criteria for classifying athletes

correspond with each other.

… the talent identification

process already includes

classification.

19

Talent Identification

The next section will ask you questions about the results of talent identifaction in your sport.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

… a sufficient number of

athletes are identified.

… more adult athletes than

young athletes are identified.

… mostly adult athletes with

an acquired disability are

identified.

… athletes with an acquired

disability are only identified if

they have prior experience in

sport.

… a sufficient number of

children and youth are

identified.

… talent identification is

considerate so that there is a

balanced ratio of different

kinds of disabilities.

… effort and output of talent

development are in a

reasonable proportion to each

other.

… the targeted goals of talent

identification are reached.

… we are successful in

international high-performance

sport due to effective and

efficient talent identification.

... only a few athletes drop out

of the talent identification

process.

20

PART II: Talent Development

Important: The following questions refer to talent development in your sport.

It might seem as if the questions are repeating themselves, but this series of questions refers

to talent development and not talent identification.

21

Talent Development

This section will ask you questions about the goals of talent development in your sport.

Talent development in my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... pursues concrete goals of

national governing bodies

(NGBs).

... pursues concrete goals of

coaches.

... has goals that are in written

form.

... has goals that are known to

all the athletes.

... has goals that are laid out

for the long term.

... supports as many talented

athletes as possible.

... supports exclusively the

most talented athletes .

... selects exclusively athletes

whose classifications are

unambiguous.

... supports exclusively

athletes who are

psychologically capable of

doing high-performance sport.

22

Talent Development

The next sections will ask you questions about the resources of talent development:

personnel, finances, and infrastructure.

Questions about Personnel

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... there is a sufficient amount

of full-time coaches in talent

development.

… the coaches responsible for

talent development are

competent.

… the officials in talent

development are competent.

Talent Development

Questions about Financial Resources

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... the available financial ressources are sufficient to ensure talent development.

... the available financial resources for talent development can be counted on for the long term.

... the financial situation of talent development has improved during the last few years.

... the amount of money available for talent development is fair compared to able-bodied sport.

23

Talent Development

Questions about Infrastructural Resources

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... there are many training sites that are accessible for high-performance athletes with a disability.

... the quality of the training sites is good.

... there are many regional/ national training centres.

... high-performance athletes with a disability have equal access to training centres that are also open to athletes without a disability.

... most of the high-performance athletes train together with able-bodied athletes.

... the high-performance athletes benefit from training together with able-bodied athletes.

... the needs of high-performance athletes with a disability are best met in disability-specific training groups.

... a sufficient number of training camps is offered for high-performance athletes.

... the quality of the training camps is good.

... there is cooperation between talent development and rehabilitation centres/hospitals.

24

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... there is cooperation between talent development and schools.

… there is cooperation between talent development and colleges/universities.

… medical support services are offered to the athletes.

... psychological support services are offered to the athletes.

… physiotherapy services are offered to the athletes.

… nutritional consultation is offered to the athletes.

… services in performance testing are offered to the athletes (e. g. lactate profile test).

… the quality of the five elite performance services mentioned above is good.

... the athletes are offered supportive ways to make their work/ education and high-performance sport compatible with each other.

25

Talent Development

This section will ask you questions about the support your sport receives from sport sciences,

government, the economy, and able-bodied sport.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

In my sport, talent development cooperates with sport science.

Coaches have access to the most recent scientific insights, which play a role in talent development.

At the elite level, government promotes my sport.

In my sport, there are sponsors who subsidise people with a disability at an elite level.

In terms of talent development, my sport cooperates with able-bodied sport.

The existence of an integrated national governing body (NGB) is /would be helpful for talent development. (Choose according to whether your NGB is currently integrated or not.)

26

Talent Development

This section will ask you questions about the support from parents and schools.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... most parents are willing to support their child in high-performance sport.

... most parents value the coaches' work.

... most parents lack the financial resources to support their child's high performance sport.

... young athletes with a disability receive good support in their school's physical education programmes.

27

CAN

The following question will ask you about the military initiative SOLDIER ON.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

BATTLE BACK is helpful for

talent development in my

sport.

USA

The following question will ask you about the military initiative WOUNDED WARRIORS.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

WOUNDED WARRIORS is

helpful for talent development

in my sport.

UK

The following question will ask you about the military initiative BATTLE BACK.

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

Our national military initiative

BATTLE BACK is helpful for

talent development in my

sport.

28

Talent Development

The next section will ask you questions about the obligations of talent development in your

sport.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does not

apply at

all

Not

applicable

(n/a)

... talent development is

systematically planned by the

NGB.

... there is a standardised

sustainable pathway for talent

development.

... there is a standardised

sustainable pathway for talent

development.

... the NGB sets fixed selection

criteria.

... talent development is too

centrally regulated by the

NGB.

... the NGB designates that

club coaches are the ones

who mostly carry out talent

development.

… the NGB designates that

talent development is mostly

carried out by coaches on a

national and/or regional level.

… decisions regarding

measures in talent

development are mainly made

by club coaches.

… decisions regarding

measures in talent

development are mainly made

by regional/ national coaches.

… talent development is

based less on requirements by

the NGB than on the

29

dedication of individual

coaches.

… the advancement of most of

the elite athletes often

happens coincidentally.

… only squad athletes receive

optimal support.

… the NGB requires that the

results of talent development

are in written form.

… the NGB requires that the

results of talent development

are in written form.

Talent Development

The next section will ask you questions about the results of talent development in your sport.

In my sport...

Applies

fully

Applies Neutral Does

not

apply

Does

not

apply at

all

Not

applic

able

(n/a)

... a sufficient number of athletes are

supported.

... talent development is considerate

so that there is a balanced ratio of

different kinds of disabilities.

... effort and output of talent

development are in a reasonable

proportion to each other.

… the targeted goals in talent

development are reached.

... we are successful in international

high-performance sport due to

effective and efficient talent

development.

... only a few athletes in the

development process drop out of it.

30

PART III

You have answered almost all of our questions - thank you very much for that. There is only

one short section to go, which will only ask a few questions about your person.

31

In which sort of club are you currently practising?

General sports club.

Integrated sports club.

Disability sports club.

Other.

Do you practice with able-bodied athletes?

Yes

No

Please indicate the highest level of your educational background.

I have no educational degree, certificate or diploma.

I have a primary / elementary school diploma.

I have a secondary education / high school diploma diploma.

I have an undergraduate (bachelor’s, associate’s, etc.) degree from a college or

university.

I have a master’s / graduate degree from a college or university.

I have a Ph.D. degree.

Other.

Are you currently enrolled as …

A high school / secondary school student.

A college/university student.

Other.

No, I am not enrolled as a student.

32

Are you currently working in addition to your competitive sporting career?

No.

Yes, part-time.

Yes, full-time.

Yes, internship.

Can you make a living exclusively from your sport? (for example, through sponsorship money, scholarships, funding from sport institutions, performance bonus)

Yes

No

How do you primarily finance yourself? If more than one answer applies, then please choose only the main one.

Employment.

Funding from sport organisations (for example NGB, umbrella sports organizations, etc.) .

Money from sponsors.

Financial support from my parents.

Financial support from my partner.

Other.

Do you have children?

Yes

No

How old are you?

Are you ... ?

male

female

33

You are finished!

We greatly appreciate that you participated in our survey.

If you have questions about the study, please e-mail Dr Sabine Radtke at:

sabine.radtke@fu-berlin.de

Please forward the survey link below to as many athletes, coaches, and officials as possible.

We focus on five Paralympic sports (athletics/track & field, swimming, wheelchair basketball, Alpine

skiing, Nordic skiing) and three countries (USA, CAN, UK).

The more people who share their opinions on these issues, the better we can all help promote

international standards of talent identification and development. Thanks in advance for your

assistance.

You can copy and paste the text below and send it to your colleagues, teammates, etc.

start copying here

Dear …

I just took a survey about talent identification and development (TID) systems in Paralympic sports. It's

a cross-cultural study initiated at the Free University Berlin, Germany. I recommend that you

participate in this important study, which aims to promote international standards of talent

development. Plus, you will receive the final report when it's finished.

It will take around 30 minutes of your time. You can start the survey by clicking here.

[SURVEY LINK]

Full details and instructions are included. The survey will end on 15th August, 2011. Feel free to

forward this email to any other athletes, coaches, or officials in the USA, UK, or Canada who are

involved in Paralympic track & field / athletics, wheelchair basketball, swimming, Alpine skiing, or

Nordic skiing, at the national level and below it.

Copy end

Thank you very much!