The tennis player in wheel chair: players‘ categories

Abstract

The objective of this article is to offer a typology of disabled tennis players who practice the sport activity in a wheelchair. First, some brief references concerning physical disability are included, an expression whose meaning includes wheelchair tennis players, which is defi ned as an individual who, as a consequence of a congenital or acquired defi ciency, is impeded of accomplishing, with normality, the basic forms of movement. The three situations dealt with in the text, which come to describe the points mentioned in the “Introduction”, comprise, respectively, of a classifi cation of the physical disabilities which are linked to the different sequelae presented (neurological, myopathic, orthopedic and rheumatic), a summary of the types of marrow injuries (with an indication of the muscle groups involved and the movements affected), and the different situations that demonstrate sequelae caused by marrow injuries, varying in function of number and class of the extremities affected (from monoplegia to quadriplegia, via paraplegia, triplegia, hemiplegia and diplegia). The thematic nucleus of this work is a description of the several categories of tennis players in wheelchairs which should establish in function of their limitations; namely: paraplegic sportsmen, tetraplegic, players with cerebral paralysis, athletes with spina bifi da, players with poliomyelitis and players with amputated lower limbs. Examples are used to illustrate ,the points, complementing the theoretical references.