Duration: 2023 – 2025
Principal Researcher
Tadeu Celestino
Team Members
Antonino Pereira
UI&D: CI&DEI
Research line:
Education, Citizenship and Inclusion
Sport evokes a plurality of meanings, and a diversity of forms with specificities of its practice, as is the case of adapted sport. In this way, in its different forms of realization, this human manifestation represents a unique field of the human values exaltation, diversity, inclusion, as well as the values of ethics and human morals.
Indeed, it is only very recently that high-performance adapted sport has become one of the main vehicles for empowering athletes with disabilities and which has gradually been blurring the social and discriminatory stigma that still exists towards disability.
Nevertheless, as Sport is a total social fact, it suffers the interference and intruson of the interests of society. Indeed, today, the social transformations undeniably tend to produce changes in the social axiological framework, and that in turn are also reflected in its different forms and means of sports achievement.
Effectively, with the evolution of the demand for adapted sports practice, whose maximum exponent materializes in the Paralympic Games, a variety of ethical dilemmas begin to emerge as a result of attitudes, behaviours and illicit and unethical practices perpetuated by diferent sports agents. Indeed, and although the reflection on sports ethics has developed in recent decades, the debate and scientific analysis of values and ethics in the context of adapted sport, and particularly in the context of the Paralympics, is actually very recent (Bredahl, 2008). In fact, the questions and problems that emerge from the issues raised by athletes with disabilities have only recently received the attention of the scientific community (MacNamee et al., 2014; Pérez Terejo et al., 2012) and that many still lack an answer.
Thus, there is an urgent need to study the context of Portuguese Paralympic Sport that allows us to obtain sustained knowledge about the representations and practices within the scope of ethics in sport and to identify examples of good practices, which may constitute references to be disseminated and promoted.