Australia at the 1984 Summer Paralympics
| Australia at the 1984 Summer Paralympics |
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| IPC code | AUS | ||||||||
| NPC | Australian Paralympic Committee | ||||||||
| Website | www |
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| in Stoke Mandeville/New York | |||||||||
| Competitors | 109 | ||||||||
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Medals Ranked 8th |
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| Summer Paralympics appearances (overview) | |||||||||
Australia competed at the 1984 Summer Paralympics that were held in two locations - Stoke Mandeville, United Kingdom (wheelchair athletes with spinal cord injuries) and in the Mitchel Athletic Complex and Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, United States of America (wheelchair and ambulatory athletes with cerebral palsy, amputees, and "Les Autres" (the others) conditions as well as blind and visually impaired athletes). Four months before the beginning of the 1984 summer Paralympics, the University of Illinois terminating their contract to hold the Games. Australia won 154 medals - 49 gold, 54 silver and 51 bronze medals. Australia competed in 9 sports and won medals in 6 sports. Australia finished 8th on the gold medal table and 7th on the total medal table.
Notable Australian performances were:
The 1984 Summer Paralympics has become known as "The last minute games". These Games were originally intended to be hosted by the University of Illinois but financial problems caused the university to pull out of hosting them three months before they were set to begin, "...without doubt resulting in a setback to the disability sports movement". On short notice, Long Island and Stoke Mandeville took up the task of hosting the Games. The NWAA felt that by hosting separate games, there would be more freedom for each disability group and more services could be provided to athletes. With 1500 athletes and officials arriving from 41 different countries it was the 35 years experience of hosting national and international games that allowed the games to be put together so quickly and efficiently. The sports stadium had been built in 1969 and ten years later the Olympic village had also been built to ensure disabled athletes always had Olympic facilities when others were closed. However, a number of small problems arose throughout the initial planning phases for the games. The seating plan needed to allow the 300-seat stadium to sit 40 different countries. Organisers claimed that there were a number of minor diplomatic problems such as the Egyptian representative Admiral Latif and organisers not knowing how many of his wives and extended family were expected to come. Furthermore, the flag the USA had provided was considerably larger than all the other nations' flags and organisers had to purchase larger flags for all other countries so the size difference wouldn’t show.
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