Para Athletics

The sport

Para athletics is the largest sport at every Paralympic Games. It covers the same disciplines as athletics — sprints, middle and long distance, road racing including the marathon, jumps, and the throws — contested by athletes with physical, vision and intellectual impairments across more than thirty sport classes.

It has been on the programme since the first Games at Rome 1960, when 25 athletics medal events were contested by 31 athletes from ten countries. Paris 2024 staged 164 medal events for 1,129 athletes from 152 countries.^[1]

Governance

Para athletics is governed by the International Paralympic Committee, operating under the name World Para Athletics. The rules make the identity explicit: "the term 'World Para Athletics' must be read in these Rules as the IPC and vice versa." There is no separate federation; the sport is administered from the IPC's offices in Bonn.^[2]

A transfer to an independent federation has been under way since 2021, went to exclusive negotiations with UK Sport and Manchester in June 2023, and was reopened to new bidders on 6 June 2025. No successor has been announced. The full chronology.^[3]

Classes

Track, jumping and frame-running events carry the prefix T; throwing events carry F. An athlete holds one F class covering discus, shot put and javelin, and may not compete standing in one discipline and seated in another.^[4]

• 11–13 — vision impairment. T/F11 is the most affected; T11 athletes must wear opaque glasses over covered eyes, and losing them mid-race is a disqualification.
• 20 — intellectual impairment, requiring Virtus eligibility first.
• 31–34 — coordination impairment, seated. 35–38 — coordination impairment, ambulant.
• 40–41 — short stature.
• 42–47 — limb deficiency competing without a prosthesis: 42–44 lower limb, 45–47 upper limb. There is no F47.
• 51–54 (track) / 51–57 (throws) — wheelchair racing and seated throws.
• 61–64 — lower limb competing with a prosthesis, split from 42–44 on 1 January 2018.
• 71–72 — frame running.

The tens digit encodes the impairment family; the units digit the degree of activity limitation, lower being more affected. Athletes in T/F61–62 are additionally subject to a Maximum Allowable Standing Height, measured in the call room, and exceeding it is a non-start.^[2]

The rules that define the sport

Guide runners. Athletes in T11 must run with a guide; T12 athletes may choose. The tether is athlete-supplied, non-elastic, must not store energy, and is limited to 30 cm between the loops on the track and 50 cm on the road — one tether only, and if it breaks during the race the athlete is disqualified. Guidance is through the tether and the voice; the guide must run or walk, may not push, pull or "slingshot" the athlete, and attachment is retained from the start until both have crossed the line. Rule 19.4: the athlete must reach the finish line ahead of the guide or be disqualified. Each vision-impaired athlete is allocated two lanes. Where the same guide completes the whole event, the guide receives a medal alongside the athlete; the IPC dates that change to London 2012. Assistants in field events do not receive medals.^[2] [5]

Wheelchair racing. Three wheels, two large and one small; braking compulsory; no gears or levers for propulsion, no mirrors, no fairings, no energy-storing elements. Steering must be by hand-operated mechanical device only. The large wheel is capped at 70 cm and carries one plain round push-rim; no part of the body may be strapped to the rim. Chairs are measured in the call room with the athlete in them. Athletes may leave their lanes once both rear wheels have passed the breakline, and placings are decided by the centre of the leading wheel axle.^[2]

Seated throws. All throwing is from a fixed frame with a maximum seat height of 75 cm, secured to the ground by approved tie-downs; athletes get four minutes to strap in, five for the most affected classes. The optional holding bar must be a single straight piece of uniform circular or square cross-section with no springs or joints, and judges are specifically assigned to watch for it flexing. Both legs must stay in contact with the seat from the back of the knee to the buttock throughout the throw — if a knee slides forward and loses contact, the trial fails.^[2]

Frame Running, classes T71 and T72, uses a three-wheeled frame with a saddle, body-support plate and handlebars, propelled by the feet — there are no pedals. It debuts at LA28, and the Games programme contains only the men's and women's 100 m T72; T71 is contested at World Championships but is not on the LA28 event list.^[2] [6]

The Universal 4×100 m Relay is the sport's own invention: two men and two women in a fixed order — a vision-impaired athlete, a limb-deficiency athlete, an ambulant coordination athlete, and a wheelchair or seated athlete.^[2]

Competitions and records

Paralympic Games first, then World Para Athletics Championships and regional championships, then a sanctioned tier of Grand Prix meetings and World Cups. The published cycle runs Worlds in years one and three, regionals in years two and four, and the Games in year four.^[2]

The most recent World Championships were New Delhi 2025, 27 September – 5 October at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium: 186 medal events, 1,182 athletes from 100 countries, topped by Brazil. The next edition is Tashkent 2027, 19–27 June, the first in Central Asia, with a programme of at least 164 events aligned to the Games.^[7] [8]

The Grand Prix is the season-long series, in its thirteenth year in 2026, running from Dubai in February to Cali in September.^[9]

LA28: 164 medal events, athlete quota 1,079, contested 16–27 August 2028 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, with the marathon on the final Sunday from Venice Beach.^[6] [10]

Records are kept per event per sport class. They can only be set at recognised competitions, by an athlete whose sport class status is Confirmed or Review with a fixed date later than the record; the national body must apply within 30 days with the results and, for automatically-timed track records, the photo-finish and zero-control images; and the competition must have run under a compliant anti-doping programme, though the record-setter need not personally have been tested. More on records.^[2]

Who has won the most in para athletics?

Para athletics has been on the programme since the first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960, and is the largest sport at them: 164 medal events at Paris 2024, against 48 in Olympic athletics, and 449 at the peak in 1984. The tables below cover all seventeen Summer Games, 1960 to Paris 2024. Sport classes are reassessed over a career, and the class-code system itself has been rebuilt twice since 1960, so one athlete's medals are often recorded under several class labels for the same impairment — bookkeeping rather than an anomaly. Counted from the International Paralympic Committee's own results database: the country table sums the IPC's per-Games medal standings and reconciles to its own total of 9,344 medals, and every athlete row was re-counted from that athlete's results tables, because the medal counter at the top of an IPC athlete page also includes World Championship medals. Olympedia, the source used for Olympic records elsewhere on this site, does not cover the Paralympic Games at all.

Most Paralympic athletics medals — men (1960–2024, 17 Games)

Most Paralympic athletics medals — men (1960–2024, 17 Games)

Most Paralympic athletics medals — women (1960–2024, 17 Games)

Most Paralympic athletics medals — women (1960–2024, 17 Games)

All-time Paralympic athletics medal table by country (1960–2024, 17 Games)

All-time Paralympic athletics medal table by country (1960–2024, 17 Games)

Medal lists rank on total medals, then gold, then silver. Equal totals are separated by golds, then silvers, and every table states the period and the Games it includes. National Paralympic Committees are listed exactly as the IPC counts them, including historic and neutral entities. Verified September 2026.^{[11] [12] [13] [14] [15]}