The exhibition is organized according to a chronological logic based on four major periods
• 1948-1960: The “Hospital Games” are organized in Stoke Mandeville, where Dr. Ludwig Guttmann initiates the movement based on an innovative experiment to promote rehabilitative sport. Until 1960, the “Stoke Games” were an increasingly important international gathering exclusively for people in wheelchairs.
• 1960-1989: The first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960 were still reserved for injured wheelchair users. Gradually, however, amputees, and later blind and partially-sighted athletes, were allowed to take part. It wasn’t until 1984 and the New York Games that athletes with cerebral palsy were included.
• 1989-2012: period of a new Paralympism that seeks to broaden its scope and bring together all international sports federations representing athletes with different types of disability or inability, opening the door to deaf athletes and those with intellectual disabilities.
• Since 2012: The London Games in 2012 marked a turning point, with the media seizing on the Paralympic Games to stage sporting performances of an unprecedented kind. These Games also saw the reintegration of athletes with intellectual disabilities into three Para sports, while those of Tokyo in 2021 saw the appearance of new disciplines and the emergence of new Paralympic figures.