ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects the voices of US goalball athletes to learn how they perceive, interpret and explain-in short, how they make sense of-their experiences being members of a national team. It analyses the athletes' experiences through four models of disability: the well-researched medical model and social model, and two models that emerged from our data: the pity model; and the difference model. The chapter presents interviews with current members of the US women's and men's goalball teams and from the authors' own experiences. The World Health Organization currently defines impairment as 'a problem in body function or structure'. However, as early as 1976, disability was defined as 'something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society'. The US goalball athletes employed the difference model of disability when explaining their identities as elite blind athletes. They explained that they were more similar to Olympians than Special Olympians.
