This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Paralympic Games trace their origin to a hospital ward, not a stadium. Ludwig Guttmann, a German Jewish neurologist who had fled Nazi persecution for Britain, was placed in charge of a new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital during the Second World War, where he treated paralyzed servicemen at a time when a severe spinal cord injury was still widely regarded as a near-certain death sentence. Guttmann introduced sport into his patients' rehabilitation as a matter of medical conviction, believing organized competition restored both physical capacity and a sense of purpose that standard hospital care did not.
He organized the first Stoke Mandeville Games in 1948, timing the event deliberately to open on the same day as that year's London Olympic Games. Sixteen injured servicemen and women took part, competing in archery, the only sport on the program. The Games grew quickly, admitting international competitors for the first time in 1952 when a team of Dutch veterans joined, and by 1960 had grown enough to move to Rome, immediately following that year's Olympic Games, in what is now recognized as the first official Paralympic Games. The formal name Paralympic and the movement's lasting institutional link to the Olympics both developed only gradually after that point, built on the foundation Guttmann's rehabilitation ward had laid more than a decade earlier.