Chris Cohen, chairman of athletics for the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), said the group is against a fully integrated world athletics championship for abled and disabled athletes. But he does call for the competition for disabled athletes to become full medal events.
Cohen said, “that would mean that the individual countries would be forced to recognize the importance of disabled events and will go back and develop the sport themselves. Our biggest weakness at the moment is that some federations really don’t regard them as important”.
Cohen has asked the International Association of Athletics Federations to help fund disabled athletics so that they can be marketed better and organized more professionally. “I think we are still pretty well ignored by a large part of the athletics press”, said Cohen, who is a volunteer. “They grudgingly put in articles about paralympic athletes”.
The classification system in disabled athletics is complex, and Cohen said there is a need to simplify the classification, but it wouldn’t be easy. There are elite athletes with different levels of disability, and “we have got to make sure that within the Paralympics, those athletes all get an opportunity to compete at their own level”, he said.
