While the origins of sport for persons with a disability can be traced to the Deaflympics in 1924, social and political attention to parasport is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since the 1960 Rome Games the number of athletes competing in the Paralympic Games has risen from 400 to 4,302 in the London 2012 Paralympic Games. Further, the number of countries has increased from 23 to 164. This increasing attention from athletes and the stakeholders involved, either directly or indirectly, with athlete development (e.g., coaches, trainers, and parents as well as from policy makers), is coupled with a concomitant increase in the need for evidence-based models of para-athlete development. Unfortunately, the pace of research on factors affecting the development of exceptional athletes in parasport has been slow, particularly compared to that of able-bodied sport. A recent systematic review conducted by our research group (Dehghansai, Lemez, Wattie, & Baker, in press) highlighted that over the past 65 years only 21 studies have been conducted on the development of para-athletes. Of these, only five focused on issues of training, development, and/or skill acquisition. The conclusion of this review was that we have very litde evidence to use to guide the creation of sport-specific models for use in parasport. Instead, approaches from able-bodied sport have typically been adapted to parasport contexts. Although there may be some universals in athlete development between parasport and able-bodied sport domains, such as the importance of high-quality coaching and deliberate practice, other factors may be considerably different. Athlete development trajectories and guidelines for sport involvement in early stages of development are examples of factors that may be appreciably different due to the unique constraints of each domain. Further, able-bodied athlete development models focus on maturation-based staging and physiological driven `windows of trainability` or sensitive periods that have little relevance to athletes with congenital or acquired disabilities. Finally, athlete development models address psycho-social-emotional development of able-bodied athletes, which do not explicitly acknowledge the unique constraints for para-athletes (see Case Study below) and therefore implicitly assume that the same challenges exist for athletes with and without disabilities. Very little attention, if any, is given to the unique psycho-social-emotional issues of being a Paralympic athlete. In the sections below, we discuss the factors affecting athlete development in parasport and highlight several important areas for future work.
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