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7 Athlete First A Note on Passing, A Note on Passing, Disability, and Sport Disability, and Sport MICHAEL A. REMBIS F OR SOME DISABLED PEOPLE, being viewed as an athlete first is the ultimate compliment, and the ultimate goal. Deborah, for example, likes to think of herself as a “sports . . . person—not as a woman—and not as disabled.” She adds, “It’s very hard work, but I like to feel strong and powerful and that’s how I win gold medals—in the same way able-bodied people do.”1 The Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher Jim Abbott reportedly once said, “I never told myself that I wanted to be the next Pete Gray [a physically impaired outfielder who played one season in 1945]. I always said I wanted to be the next Nolan Ryan.”2 This revelation compelled one baseball historian to explain that Abbott’s comment was not meant as an insult to Gray but was a statement of Abbott’s desire to be seen as a “ballplayer—not a ‘one-armed’ ballplayer.”3 While on the surface these admissions may seem innocuous or even empowering, a testament to ideas of “inclusion” and “normalization ,” I argue that they are a powerful and, in some cases, physically and psychically debilitating form of passing.4 “Athlete First” is the title of a recent monograph on the history of the Paralympics (Steve Bailey, Athlete First: A History of the Paralympic Movement [Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2008]). My subtitle is (I hope) an obvious play on Erving Goffman’s universally influential study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963). 112 Î Michael A. Rembis In this essay, I analyze the experiences and utterances of elite disabled athletes in a variety of historical settings and social and geographic locations as a means of theorizing (and problematizing) our understanding of passing.5 The goal of the essay is not to “out” disabled athletes or undermine their achievements. Whether they have competed with their nondisabled peers or exclusively in what we might call disabled sport, athletes with disabilities have made tremendous gains both individually and collectively in securing a place on the world stage for themselves and for disabled people generally.6 While the early history of modern sport contains many stories of disabled athletes, it has only been since the end of World War II, and even more recently, since the United Nations General Assembly declared 1983–1992 the Decade of Disabled Persons, that disabled sports such as wheelchair basketball, road racing, track and field, tennis, and wheelchair rugby (known also as murderball), as well as many other winter sports, have become global events attracting thousands of athletes and spectators. The Summer and Winter Paralympics have become huge sporting festivals in recent decades. Advances in sporting technology are making ever more difficult athletic feats attainable, which will no doubt continue to enhance the integration of disabled athletes into nondisabled sport and increase the popularity of disabled sport among the nondisabled. Every year, the number of disabled athletes competing at the highest levels grows. These tremendous gains have affected (however unevenly) the lives of all disabled people in what most observers consider positive ways— increased awareness, access, and legitimacy, increased acceptance and inclusion, and a generally more positive public attitude toward disability and disabled people. Yet I would like to suggest that all of this newfound notoriety and acceptance has come at a high cost not only for disabled athletes but also for all of those non-sporting individuals living their lives with impairment. It is the former and not the latter that I will speak to in this essay. For some elite athletes, especially those who have been marginalized in other ways, through their race, class, gender, or the “severity” of their disability, the climb to the pinnacle of the sporting world has required the public erasure of significant aspects of their personal identity . They have been forced to pass. As the following venture into disability , sport, and passing will show, passing need not always involve the act of physically concealing one’s impairment, but rather depends on how well one can approximate the gendered, white, heterosexual, Athlete First D 113 nondisabled norm and meet societal expectations for conduct, competition , appearance, and performance. It is too simplistic to think of passing strictly in terms of “visibility” as in Tobin Siebers’s assertion that “the more visible the disability the greater the chance the person...

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