A refugee doctor started his own Olympics with 16 patients
Ludwig Guttmann fled the Gestapo, then decided paralyzed war veterans didn't need pity. They needed a starting gun.
In 1939, the neurologist Ludwig Guttmann left Germany for Britain, one step ahead of the Nazi regime that had already stripped his medical title and, a few months earlier, watched him personally save sixty of sixty-four Jewish patients from arrest during Kristallnacht by admitting anyone who showed up at his hospital's door, no questions asked.
In England, he was put in charge of a spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, treating veterans paralyzed in the war. The medical consensus of the era treated spinal cord injury as close to a death sentence, patients were often expected to spend what remained of their lives in bed, prone to bedsores and infections that usually killed them within a couple of years. Guttmann disagreed with the prognosis on principle: he believed rehabilitation, not resignation, was the actual treatment, and that competitive sport could be part of it.
On July 29, 1948, the same day the London Olympics opened across the city, Guttmann held a wheelchair archery competition on the hospital lawn for sixteen injured veterans. He called it the Stoke Mandeville Games and ran it again the next year, then the year after that.
By 1952, Dutch athletes had joined, making it the first international competition for disabled athletes. It kept growing under his direction until it became the modern Paralympic Games, which now draws thousands of competitors from more than a hundred countries. It started as sixteen people and a target, run by a doctor who refused to accept what everyone else called inevitable.