Greece at the 2016 Summer Paralympics
| Greece at the 2016 Summer Paralympics |
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| IPC code | GRE | ||||||||
| NPC | Hellenic Paralympic Committee | ||||||||
| Website | www |
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| in Rio de Janeiro | |||||||||
| Competitors | 60 in 12 sports | ||||||||
| Flag bearer |
Grigorios Polychronidis (Opening) Athanasios Konstantinidis (Closing) |
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Medals Ranked 24th |
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| Summer Paralympics appearances | |||||||||
Greece competed at the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 7 September to 18 September 2016. The first places the team qualified were for three athletes in sailing events.
Funding for Greece's national Paralympic committee comes through the Greek Ministry of Sports and the General Secretariat of Sports. While Greek Paralympians get some support from their national sport federations, many were also getting support from the Greek NPC. The economic situation in the country led to less funding from the government, which caused the Greeks rely more on sponsorship to serve a stop gap measure. One of the biggest sponsors was OPAP, Greece's national lottery. In a few cases, Greek athletes had to self-fund if they wanted to participate internationally as their NPC did not have the funds. In 2013, there was also a tremendous discrepancy in funding between Paralympic sport and Olympic sport, with the Olympic side getting €1,400,000 while the Paralympic side got €200,000.
Every participant at the Paralympics has their disability grouped into one of five disability categories; amputation, the condition may be congenital or sustained through injury or illness; cerebral palsy; wheelchair athletes, there is often overlap between this and other categories; visual impairment, including blindness; Les autres, any physical disability that does not fall strictly under one of the other categories, for example dwarfism or multiple sclerosis. Each Paralympic sport then has its own classifications, dependent upon the specific physical demands of competition. Events are given a code, made of numbers and letters, describing the type of event and classification of the athletes competing. Some sports, such as athletics, divide athletes by both the category and severity of their disabilities, other sports, for example swimming, group competitors from different categories together, the only separation being based on the severity of the disability.
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