00:00Classification is important because it makes a fair competition for people who have a physical
00:07impairment, a visual impairment or an intellectual impairment.
00:10I'm Tanya Spencer, I'm a physiotherapist, I'm also a national level athletics classifier.
00:15So with classification we will complete an assessment process with athletes who have
00:20a physical disability to see what impact their impairments have on how they carry out their
00:26sport.
00:27We want to make sure that the athletes who have similar impairments and a similar impact
00:30on their sports performance are competing against each other and that just makes competition
00:34fair, so that the best athlete will win on the day rather than the athlete with the smallest
00:39impairment.
00:40I am Sam Rizzo, I'm a T54 para-athlete competing in the 800, 1500 and 5000.
00:45It's important so it's an even playing field for everybody that's participating.
00:51Can you tell me a bit about how many sessions you have on the track and in the gym and what
00:54that sort of all looks like?
00:55We have between four and five track and road sessions.
00:59So it's really important for us to ask an athlete about their training and competition
01:03history that will give us a sense of how much of their performance is due to their impairment
01:08and how much is due to their training.
01:10The really important bit of the information is what their health condition is and what
01:13sort of physical impairments result from that and how that might impact their sports performance.
01:17We need to know that it's all very consistent, that what they're telling us matches up with
01:22what we're going to see in our assessment tests and so that's the next thing.
01:25Can you try it again, pulling up?
01:27Good job, push, push, push, push, push, push, push.
01:29So on the track with Sam, I'm really trying to see how he goes with his warm-ups and his
01:34run-throughs to kind of get an idea of how his physical impairment impacts how he performs
01:39his sport.
01:40So I'm looking at his trunk function, so whether his trunk stays low or whether he has a rise
01:46and fall when he's propelling and I'm also looking at how his hand function, how high
01:51his elbows are getting when he's propelling and that's all going to give me a sense of
01:55which class he might fall into.
01:57So Sam's a T54 athlete, so that means that Sam has trunk function and he has quite good
02:02strength in his arms.
02:04Every sport has its own eligibility criteria and various impairments that can be classified
02:14and I guess the impairment has to have an impact on the way that an athlete plays sport.
02:17The way that I think about a good example is that if you're missing a finger for running
02:22it's not going to make a huge impairment and so for some of the longer distance events
02:26you may not be eligible to compete, but missing a finger in swimming would have a huge impact
02:31in terms of if you pull through the water and so the classification has to be different
02:35within those two different sports because the impact of that impairment has such a different
02:40impact on how they perform in their various events.
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