The birth of a new games: How one inspirational man escaped the Nazis and created the modern day Paralympics
A pioneering neurologist who fled Nazi Germany for a safer life in Britain could never have dreamed that a low-key archery contest for war veterans with horrific injuries would one day become the London 2012 Paralympic Games.In 17 days' time the grand Olympic stadium in east London will light up once more with an opening ceremony packed with athletes and volunteers hailing the start of competitions.
It's a far cry from the post-war hospital lawn in Buckinghamshire, where Dr Ludwig Guttman's radical methods of treating spinal injuries fired the first shots of the modern day Paralympics watched by just a handful of family, friends and staff.
The first Mandeville Games, which grew into the
Paralympics, was an archery contest between two homes for injured
veterans in 1948
Sir Ludwig Guttmann, the founding father of the
modern day Paralympics, escaped Nazi Germany and transformed perceptions
of disabilities in sport
The archery competition at Stoke Mandeville was
the precursor to the modern Paralympics, giving war veterans with
terrible injuries strength and confidence
Now, 64 years since the victorious team collected a shield as their prize, more than 4,200 athletes from 160 countries will fight for 500 gold medals.
Dr Guttmann's story has now been transformed into an upcoming BBC2 drama with Eddie Marsan as the German doctor and Rob Brydon as one of his patients, to be screened on Thursday August 14.
The inspirational medic told his patients: 'The day will come when there will be an Olympic Games for the disabled like you.'
Before Dr Guttmann's arrival in Buckinghamshire, the life expectancy of those with spinal injuries was a mere two years. They were written-off and told they would never walk again, and would suffer horrific bed sores and infections before their premature deaths.
He rejected these methods and decided that sport was a way to restore the strength, self-esteem and confidence of patients who would before have been confined to a hospital bed.
After seeing some of his patients in their wheelchairs throwing a ball pushed his war veterans to overcome the physical limits of their terrible injuries from the battlefields of World War II and watched their progress soar.
Dr Guttmann, who became Sir Ludwig in 1966, worked to prevent infections taking hold and got patients sitting up in bed and walking rather than immobilised in casts.
'If I ever did one good thing in my medical career it was to introduce sport into the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled people', he wrote in the Reader's Digest in 1967.
Scottish archers joined the 1954 competition as word of Dr Ludwig Guttmann's work at Stoke Mandeville began to spread
The U.S. took on the Netherlands at basketball in the 1955 Paraplegic Games at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for spinal injuries
In 1984 Prince Charles opened the Paralympics, complete with sombrero
His heroics began in Nazi Germany on Kristallnacht, where 'The Night of the Broken Glass', saw thousands of Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues ransacked and burnt throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria.
Up to 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps that night in what is now seen as the beginning of the Nazi's Final Solution, while Hitler's Action 4 programme went on to kill more than 200,000 people with medical or physical disabilities.
Dr Guttmann was the medical director of the Jewish hospital in Breslau on Kristallnacht, and instructed staff to admit everyone who came to the door looking for sanctuary as a patient.
The next day, as the Gestapo came to investigate why there had been so many hospital admissions, Dr Guttmann invented illnesses for the 64 Jews who had been given a bed and managed to save 60 lives.
He had worn sturdy boots and his coat to work that day, fully expecting to be sent to a concentration camp for defying the Nazi regime.
Instead he fled Germany for Britain with his wife and family as an asylum seeker, and took up his post at Stoke Mandeville in 1944.
Just four years later the Stoke Mandeville Games took place, with a team of the hospital's patients pitted against opponents from the Royal Star and Garter unit for injured veterans in Surrey.
The following year, the number of participants more than doubled as 37 patients from six units around Britain flocked to Buckinghamshire to fight it out in archery and netball contests.
Dr Guttmann once said: 'I prophesy the Mandeville Games will achieve world fame as the disabled person's equivalent of the Olympics. I never gave up hope that this dream would become reality.'
In 1952, the seeds of his dream began to flower as a team of Dutch paraplegics joined the 130-strong contest. In 1953, Canadian competitors crossed the Atlantic to take part.
Great Britain took on France in wheelchair basketball in the 1958 Games as Dutch athletes looked on
The Paralympics opened to non-wheelchair users in Toronto 1976. By 1980 there were athletes competing in the categories we see today: visually impaired, cerebral palsy, amputees, wheelchair users and Les Autres - which includes competitors with dwarfism, multiple sclerosis and congenital deformities.
Sir Ludwig, known affectionately by his patients as Poppa, died in 1980 of heart failure, months after a heart attack.
In the same year the International Olympics Committee recognised the name of the Paralympic Games for the event, and retrospectively anointed the 1960 meeting in Rome as the first ever Paralympics, while the stadium at Stoke Mandeville took his name.
His daughter Eva Loeffler, 80, told The People: 'My father would have been truly amazed to see what they have become today. Amazed and very proud.
'His dream was that athletes with disability would be free to show their skills and their talent and compete with honour just the same as the able-bodied. He knew in his heart that it would happen.
'But even he never imagined it would become as big as this.'
Eddie Marsan and Rob Brydon are bringing Dr Ludwig Guttmann's story to life in BBC2 drama Best of Men this Thursday
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