Swimming Australia through multi class swimming provides meaningful competition for swimmers with a disability.  Swimming is the one of the few sports that combines physical disabilities together in a certain classifications which is determined by the athlete’s classification test as follows;

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Cerebral palsy athletes will compete against athletes with spinal cord injury (weakness or paralysis involving any combination of the limbs) and other disabilities (such as dwarfism and major joint restriction conditions) across classes.

The classifications 1-10 are allocated to swimmers with a physical impairment. The lower the number, the more severe the impairment. Swimmers could have different classifications for different strokes depending on their range of movement. For example, S is used for freestyle, backstroke and butterfly. SB is for breaststroke, and SM is the individual medley.

For example a common classification for cerebral palsy hemiplegic swimmers is S8 or SB8.

 

Find out more about adaptive swimming and classification in Australia here:

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