ABSTRACT
In 1984, and with 44 medals, Spain was tenth in the Paralympics – or, properly speaking, the ‘International Games for the Disabled,’ as they were officially called, given the reluctance of the International Olympic Committee to share its label. In the 2012 Paralympics, Spain obtained the same position. That Spain fared so well in 2012 can be easily explained. For the last few decades, and due to a growing public concern regarding the disabled population, successive governments have been implementing a broad array of measures to improve their quality of life. But the success of the 1984 Paralympics has a different explanation. Franco’s dictatorship had collapsed only nine years earlier, and the Spanish welfare state was still in its infancy. What explains the success of the Spanish disabled athletes in 1984 is demography. From the late 1950s to 1963 there was a polio epidemic in Spain. (It was the last one, but an unusually long epidemic, given the reluctance of Franco’s government to extend the use of the oral Sabine vaccine, for the simple reason that it had been developed with the help of Russian laboratories – see Martínez Pérez et al., 2012). By the mid-1980s, because the most popular rehabilitation treatment for polio victims was swimming, Spain had amassed a large number of disabled swimmers. And it was mostly because of these swimmers that Spain fared so well.
