Sports Access For Children, Weekend Warriors And Veterans

Forbes

17-06-2025

The intersection of accessibility and sports often conjures images of high-speed blade runners at the Paralympics—the elite level of competition. These are the athletes who get featured on television and set records.
But for millions of others with disabilities, the issues are more under-the-radar. Amputees who long to go for a casual run—or snowboard, or ski—need affordable prosthetic solutions for lower or upper limbs. Adaptive sports athletes need rehabilitation strategies tailored to their disability and unique injuries. Below are the champions in all of these fields, and more.
Courtesy of Angel City Sports
A two-time Paralympic gold medalist, Ezra Frech is on a double mission: get Paralympic sports recognized and covered and appreciated in the way that Olympic competitions are; and have Angel City Sports, the adaptive sports organization founded with his father Clayton, create a pipeline of elite Paralympic athletes. Born with a left leg needing to be amputated and missing fingers on his left hand, Frech could become the hometown face of the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympic Games, where he will attempt to be the first athlete in either Paralympic or Olympic history to win gold medals in the 100-meter dash, the long jump and the high jump. Frech's story will be featured in Adaptive: Paris, a documentary series airing on Peacock July 28. "I genuinely feel I was put on this earth to normalize disability," Frech says. "My dreams of going down as one of the greatest Paralympians of all time, one of the greatest athletes of all time, is just a stepping stone to create broader change." Angel City Sports hosts competitions, trains athletes in 30 sports and has conducted hundreds of clinics. "Not everyone's going to go to the Paralympics," Clayton Frech says, 'but once you find your spot, even if it's just fitness and going to the gym, you go live your life."
Obtaining quality lower-limb prosthetics is difficult even in developed countries. "In the U.S., up until last year, Medicare and private insurance only paid for those they consider to be 'active' amputees, meaning typically younger individuals," says Sveinn Solvason, president and CEO of Iceland-based Embla Medical, which produces the prosthetics and orthoses (external frames for weak limbs) used by millions worldwide under its Össur brand. In developing countries, the story is even worse, with only a fraction able to obtain proper prosthetics. Embla is attacking that on three fronts: by investing almost $40 million a year in new technology (bionics, sensor-based motion and new materials); by deploying hundreds of engineers on research that could reduce the cost of prosthetics; and by educating insurance/payer systems on the long-term health benefits—and therefore reduced costs—of better mobility and therefore healthier lifestyles. Embla also runs about 200 clinics that custom-assemble prosthetics for people in 11 countries.
Traditional prosthetics for amputees are clunky and almost discourage activity, let alone the playing of sports. But fancy blades, the kind you see at the Paralympics, cost thousands of dollars even in less-sophisticated home versions. Eight French college students set out to change that, creating a carbon-fiber blade for the everyday runner (or walker) that uses "end of roll" leftovers from Airbus' aircraft manufacturing. A patented Velcro attachment lets tread be swapped out when it wears down. The work went from a student project to commercial in 2022, with a product that costs 30-50% less than competitors. Next up: feet for skiing and snowboarding, and branching out into the U.S. market. "You have more energy return—it's really the sensation of springing," Hopper cofounder Lou-Emmanuelle Leclercq says. "When some people try our blade, the first thing that they say to us is, 'Oh wow, I just felt the wind on my face. That was something I forgot in my daily life.' "
Courtesy of Jill Moore
It's called 'the dignity of risk'—a child's need to challenge themselves on a playground even if it means learning the hard way by falling off a jungle gym or tumbling down a slide, skinned knees be damned. But kids in wheelchairs and with other disabilities often can only sit and watch their friends. Landscape Structures builds playgrounds across the U.S. and Canada with universal design so disabled children can use them as readily as anyone else: merry-go-rounds and swings accommodate wheelchairs so all kids can enjoy them together; for low-vision children, contrasting colors and shapes help them see where different activity stations, even dangers, are. 'Playgrounds can be scary but they're important—you want the chance to try,' says Moore, a former Team USA wheelchair racer. 'We have the right to make informed choices and take reasonable risks to learn how to grow and succeed.' Millions of disabled children—and disabled parents—have enjoyed Landscape Structures playgrounds in the past several years alone.
Paralympians get the attention, but what about the everyday athlete with a disability who just wants to shoot some hoops or go for a neighborhood jog? Since 1956, Move United has provided nationwide sports opportunities, competitions and education for people with disabilities. With 245 member organizations in 45 states, most of the country's population is within an hour's drive of a Move United facility or competition, and about 125,000 athletes participate annually in 70 sports. "We're about just getting people out of their couch, out of their house and engaged in community," CEO Glenn Merry says, who notes that people with disabilities involved in sports are twice as likely to enter the workforce. The organization also offers free, on-demand virtual adaptive fitness classes and special programs for wounded veterans, which could have unique effects on that community: Merry says that although the formal research is slim, anecdotal evidence suggests that wounded veterans involved in sports take their lives by suicide less often.
After decades of lip service at best, NBC has finally figured out how to broadcast the Paralympics as sports, not disabled people playing sports. Wheelchair basketball players crash the boards as ferociously as anyone in the NBA. Powerlifters' neck veins fibrillate. Last year France's blind soccer team won the gold medal in Paris in a shootout, with its home fans going bananas. 'The athleticism, once you really understand what you're watching, it makes you appreciate them as athletes even more,' says Alexa Pritting, who oversees winter and summer Paralympic coverage for NBC. 'The No. 1 thing I've heard from athletes is that their disability is the least interesting thing about them. It's appreciation for the sport and not always the backstory.' Today, NBC hires former Paralympians to serve as color commentators during live events, just like any other sports broadcast, and paralympic coverage (both live television and streaming) has grown from a mere trickle 20 years ago to 1,400 hours across all 22 Paralympic sports in 2024, reaching 15.4 million viewers across all platforms. The 2028 Los Angeles games could be the ultimate coming-out party, introducing fans to a whole new world of sports and encouraging disabled athletes to play, too.
Courtesy of Nico Marcolongo
Many U.S. service people come home from conflict missing limbs or with other injuries that keep them from playing sports again. Operation Rebound, a program run by the Challenged Athletes Foundation, has provided thousands of veterans (as well as injured first responders) with prosthetics, orthotics and other equipment that insurance and the Veterans Administration do not cover, while also offering coaching, training, competition expenses and other support. 'Sports equipment is considered a luxury,' says Kristine Entwhistle, CEO of the Challenged Athletes Foundation. 'If a running prosthetic is $15,000, a rugby chair is $7,000, these are big-ticket items required for participation that aren't affordable.' Operation Rebound's service to the veterans community is particularly vital, as sports and exercise are known to reduce PTSD symptoms and increase feelings of community.
After winning seven Paralympic medals in wheelchair racing from 2000-2008—and winning two Boston Marathons—Blauwet earned her medical degree from Stanford and has become perhaps the nation's leading expert on preventing and rehabbing injuries for all adaptive sports athletes (professional and recreational) to get them back into competition. For example, wheelchair athletes' shoulders take a unique pounding; fractures and other musculoskeletal injuries can require altogether different therapies; and blind athletes must take different concussion tests. 'A shoulder tear for me is like an ACL tear for a soccer player,' says Blauwet, who beyond her posts at Spaulding Rehabilitation and Mass General is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. 'And your life is completely disrupted. Like you can't push off to get yourself into bed.' Away from the clinic, Blauwet has spearheaded equal support for elite athletes—none more symbolic than the adding of 'Paralympic' to the 'U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee,' which led to higher medal bonuses and media coverage.
For decades one of the most prominent impact-makers in the field of intellectual disability, Special Olympics holds close to 50,000 events per year for four million athletes. But the real mission of the organization goes beyond the positive experiences in competition. "We use the power of sport to ensure that our athletes are more accepted in communities, in the workplace and wherever people operate,' Global CEO Mary Davis says. Special Olympics also educates professionals in a variety of fields, including education, healthcare and software development. "People with intellectual disability are one of the most marginalized populations in the world when it comes to provision of healthcare," mostly due to lack of understanding, she says, while adding that software developers, including those working on AI tools, can have a huge impact on the community: "If developers fail to listen to people with intellectual or developmental disability, that's going to result in about 3% of the population being locked out of this technology. We do not want to be left behind."
Courtesy of USOPC
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic committees became one entity in 2019, almost instantly leading to better rewards, training and exposure for elite Paralympic athletes. The USOPC works not only to serve both Olympians and Paralympians and facilitate competitions, but also to encourage venues to become accessible and collegiate competitions to welcome both groups, as USA Track & Field did this year when it absorbed the U.S. Paralympic Track & Field program. The committee made Operation Gold, the monetary bonus for winning a medal, the same for all athletes. It extended Elite Athlete Health Insurance to all. Sometimes the committee must treat athletes differently—a wheelchair basketball or sled hockey game is very different from traditional versions—or health needs may be different from one athlete to the next. "We constantly look at, 'Are we doing this differently for a reason, or are we just doing this differently and they should be integrated?'" CEO Sarah Hirshland says. "Yes, our name is integrated. Yes, our team and the way we talk about team USA is fully integrated. But operationally, there's still work to be done."
The Warrior Games, held annually by the U.S. Department of Defense, were founded in 2010. "We were at the height of the wars," says Amanda Miller, who leads the Warrior Games' Army team. "Many service members sustained very severe injuries. They said, we've come a long way in the medical recovery of these service members and saving their lives on the battlefield, but let's do something fun to really showcase their resilience. It really brought to light the impact adaptive sports plays on the healing recovery journey." Prince Harry watched them in 2013 and was inspired to create the Invictus Games, a similar competition which expanded to multiple nations. The Warrior Games return to Colorado Springs in July and will include about 350 athletes, eleven sports and five teams: Army, Navy/Coast Guard, Air Force/Space Force, Marines and Special Forces/Command.