Patrick Anderson of Team Canada shoots during a wheelchair basketball match against Team Germany at the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games. This is Anderson’s sixth Paralympic Games. Image: Naomi Baker/Getty Images
Patrick Anderson was just a kid at sports camp when he played wheelchair basketball for the first time.
“I rolled onto the court, picked up a ball, and I was sort of transformed,” he recalls. “It was the first time I really felt like I was in control. I had independence again, freedom of movement and joy … that feeling of joy has never been purer and sharper, and in some ways, it hasn’t left me all these decades later.”
He’s put those decades to good use.
Anderson is widely recognized as the greatest to ever play the sport. The six-time Paralympian has led his wheelchair basketball team to victory again and again. In the time he’s been playing, Team Canada has won three gold medals and a silver.
But in the time since Patrick’s wheels first hit the court, the sport has also changed dramatically. He says that’s due in part to the technological innovations in wheelchair athletics.
When wheelchair basketball began in the 1940s, the military veteran players used their everyday chairs. But if you stream a basketball game at the Paralympics today, you’ll notice a number of differences between the chairs used on and off the court.
The seat backs are often lower. The wheels are angled outward. Small additional wheels prevent tipping, and allow athletes to perform moves like fadeaways. And, of course, each chair is further customized to meet individual athletes’ needs.
Vicky Tolfrey compares it to Formula One racing.
“You might have the most expensive racing car, but unless you’ve got a good driver, you’re not going to be the best,” says Tolfrey, a sport scientist and director of the Peter Harrison Centre for Disability Sport at Loughborough University in England. “In a wheelchair sport, you might spend thousands of dollars, thousands of pounds, on a sports chair… but it’s about that sort of bespoke, individualized matching of the impairment, to the chair, to the requirements of their position.”
An athlete playing wheelchair tennis, for example, will have very different chair needs than a long distance wheelchair racer. Even within the same sport, a defense player and an offense player could have different needs and preferences for their chair.
“Whilst I might be looking at innovative wheelchair technologies, or trying to improve the physiology and the exercise domain and put together a training regime, it’s always come from asking the athletes: What do they want?” says Tolfrey. “What do they need to know?”
Interested in hearing more about the science behind sports? Email us at [email protected] — we’d love to hear your feedback!
Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and Jessica Yung. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Sophie Bushwick.
