Military Links to Competitive Sport and Games as Part of the Rehabilitation and Recovery Process

The Paralympic Games grew out of the use of sport in the rehabilitation and recovery process of spinally injured service personnel at Stoke Mandeville hospital, UK following World War II. In recent years there has been a resurgence in the use of sport in the rehabilitation and recovery process of wounded and ill military personnel in number of countries around the world. This brief paper examines some of the possible reasons for this resurgence, as well as the creation of close links between the military sporting rehabilitation practices and the National Paralympic committees in some countries, where an almost symbiotic link appears to be developing between the Paralympic movement and the military rehabilitation and recovery process from which the Paralympic movement originally sprang.