EM356: CREMONA - DISABILITY AND SPORT: WHEN DIFFICULTY BECOMES AN OPPORTUNITY

Sport plays an important role in the physical, mental and social development of the person; It allows you to deepen your knowledge of your body, your potential, but also your limits. In particular, it is a fundamental element for people with disabilities as it is an opportunity for growth and training that also allows them to achieve important internal well-being even after traumatic and non-traumatic events that can change their life. Practicing sports disciplines is certainly useful on both a physical and psychological level: in fact, it helps to regain one's autonomy, fulfill oneself on a social level, recover and strengthen self-esteem, as well as often having the value of a rehabilitation program capable of increasing motor and psychophysical performance. Furthermore, within the sporting world, the interactions that are established are multiple and of different types: you come into contact with the coach, with your teammates, in the case of team sports, and with your opponents; and this vast range of relationships and connections allows the subject to experiment and experiment in the management of different types of emotions and possible relational conflicts, allowing him to re-calibrate the way he presents himself towards the social context in which he lives and moves and towards people with which he interacts.
Relationships in the sporting field also push us to recognize roles and purposes, helping to build a personal identity which in certain cases is compromised by life events. It therefore follows that practicing sports, for a disabled person, also represents an important moment of reintegration and inclusion in a wide-ranging social context.

The social phenomenon "sport and disability" can therefore be analyzed in two well-defined areas: the one in which sport has assumed and assumes a curative-rehabilitative function, also contributing to improving not only the expectations but also the quality of life of disabled people ( think for example of the benefits brought by wheelchair racing, which contributes to greater competence and speed in using the wheelchair). In this direction, therefore, sporting activity carries out a function of recovery, recovery and increase of "new" motor and psycho-motor skills by making people accept the differences compared to the functional stereotypes considered "physiological" and/or to the past.
And the "inclusive" sphere, for which sport has represented and still represents a reference value, especially in reference to unique aspects linked to the human person, such as originality, authenticity and freedom, but also talent , determination and courage.
From this perspective, the term "inclusion" therefore highlights a permeability and exchange between subjects, even with different motor, intellectual and psychological abilities, which lead to and develop a continuous and constant growth of each of them.

And it is precisely in the constant development of these spheres that disabled sport, especially in recent years, has reached a level of excellence, even going so far as to 'compete' not only from a media and economic point of view, but sometimes even in that of competitive results, with sport practiced by able-bodied people.
From the development of these themes was born the idea of ​​organizing a conference that could address and develop both the curative-rehabilitative sphere, through the reports of experts and technicians in the sector capable of extending knowledge on the positive and negative effects on the athlete disabled person, of carrying out a sporting activity.

But also the relational-social sphere through the testimony of disabled athletes of the highest level.

All organized in a socio-health rehabilitation center such as CR2 Sinapsi, unique at a national level.