IPC — International Paralympic Committee

What the IPC is

The International Paralympic Committee is the global governing body of the Paralympic Movement. It was founded on 22 September 1989 in Düsseldorf as a non-profit association under German law, and is based at Dahlmannstraße 2 in Bonn.^[1]

It is a membership organisation, and the membership is unusual enough to be worth setting out. As of 1 January 2026 the IPC had 211 member organisations:^[1]

• 185 National Paralympic Committees — the sole representative of the Movement in each territory, holding the exclusive right to enter athletes in the Paralympic Games.
• 18 international federations — the bodies that govern sports on the Paralympic programme. Fourteen are Olympic-and-Paralympic federations; four are Paralympic sport federations.
• 5 regional organisations — Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania.
• 3 international organisations of sport for the disabled — IBSA (blind sports), Virtus (intellectual impairment) and World Abilitysport, created by the merger of CPISRA and IWAS.

That last category is small and structurally important: it is where impairment-specific eligibility is settled before a sport-specific class is ever allocated. More on how that works.

The thing the IPC is trying to stop being

The IPC's defining institutional problem is that it is two things at once: the governing body of a movement, and the international federation for individual sports competing within it. Being the regulator and the regulated is a structural conflict, and the IPC has spent seven years trying to resolve it by giving the sports away.

The mechanism sits in its own Constitution. Article 21.1 reads: "The aim is for all IPC Sports to separate from the IPC by no later than 31 December 2026. If at the 2025 General Assembly there are any IPC Sports remaining that are unlikely to separate from the IPC by 31 December 2026, the Governing Board will put forward different options for each of those IPC Sports for the General Assembly to consider."^[2]

Read that carefully. It is an aim, not an obligation, and the article expressly anticipates its own failure and routes the leftovers back to a General Assembly. Article 21.2 states what applies in the meantime: "the IPC will act as the international federation for the sport; and the NPCs will act as national federations for the sport."^[2]

To manage the exit, Article 22 required the IPC to establish a World Para Sports Unit — "an internal division of the IPC (and so legally part of the IPC), but is operationally independent, with its own board, staff, and managing director." Its board approves each sport's leaving plan, and until separation approves that sport's structure, budgets, competition calendars, qualification criteria and rules. It disbands once every IPC Sport has gone.^[2]

As at 29 August 2026 the IPC's own sports page still reads: "The IPC is responsible for the governance of five sports (Para athletics, Para ice hockey, Para powerlifting, Para swimming and shooting Para sport)." Four of those five have no announced successor, with four months of 2026 remaining. The full chronology.^[3]

What the IPC publishes that binds other people

Three instruments do most of the work.

The IPC Classification Code. Its third edition took effect on 1 January 2025, approved at an Extraordinary General Assembly on 17 May 2024 by 81 votes to 2, and supported by three International Standards — on classification personnel and training, on intentional misrepresentation, and on classification data protection. Every federation running a Paralympic sport classifies under it, including federations the IPC does not otherwise govern: the UCI's own regulations state that its classification rules "implement the requirements of the IPC Athlete Classification Code."^[4] [5]

The Paralympic Games Regulations. Article 2.8 is the one that matters most and is least known: all disputes about sports technical rules during the Games, including classification, are resolved by the IPC, "whose decision on these matters is final, non-appealable and enforceable," and each member "waives its right to institute any claim, arbitration or litigation, or seek any other form of relief in any other court or tribunal." Note what that excludes.^[6]

The athlete database. The IPC operates SDMS, which issues one permanent athlete identifier for a career and holds licences, sport classes, rankings and records for the sports it governs. A licence must be held before a competition starts for results to count towards rankings or records. More on that layer.^[7]

Leadership and the Games

The IPC is led by a President elected by the General Assembly. Andrew Parsons was re-elected on 27 September 2025 for a third and final term.^[8]

The Games themselves are the IPC's largest undertaking. The next three editions are the LA28 Paralympic Games, 15–27 August 2028; the Alpes 2030 Paralympic Winter Games, 1–10 March 2030; and Brisbane 2032, 24 August – 5 September 2032.^[1]