With the Paris 2024 Paralympics now underway, Romania’s former sports minister and Paralympic champion, Eduard Novak, a cyclist born in Csíkszereda, Romania, is sounding the alarm to draw attention to a shocking phenomenon.
He believes that political pressure has led to the redistribution of disability classes by the expert panel, which is increasingly attracting athletes with minor disabilities while crowding out those with genuine limb impairments and disabilities.
CLASSIFICATION It is the responsibility of the International Cycling Union (UCI) to determine the classes into which a designated body (classification panel) classifies riders according to the extent of their impairment and in line with the various classification procedures within para-cycling. In principle, the aim should be nothing other than to create the most objective possible conditions of competition between the different levels of disability. It seems that by ‘rewriting’ the classification criteria according to almost incomprehensible criteria, from C1, the most severe injury level, to C5, where riders have good legs but limb deficits in their arms or hands, the classifiers are now fundamentally upsetting the classification of injuries.
CONSEQUENCE As a visible consequence, most of the riders who had previously been wearing prosthetic legs have been squeezed out and replaced by riders with barely noticeabe injuries. “We need to sound the alarm because we are being squeezed out of our own races,” Eduard Novak, 48, who won the 4km track cycling race in the C4 category at the London Paralympics and will compete in all track cycling, road cycling and time trial events at his sixth Paralympics in Paris, tells Nemzeti Sport.
A ROMANIAN PARA-CYCLING LEGEND Eduard Novak, as he is known in the international para-sport world, was one of Romania’s most promising speedskaters when he suffered a terrible accident in 1996. He was preparing for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano but losing his right foot in that serious accident shattered all his Olympic dreams. Two years later, with a prosthesis in place of his right leg, he started cycling as an amateur. “In 2003 I qualified for the Athens Paralympics as a para-athlete and four years later, in Beijing, I won my first silver medal in the road time trial. The London Olympics was the best so far, where I won a gold medal in the 4km track bike and a silver in the road, followed by another silver in track cycling in Tokyo, and now I’m wondering whether I can compete with the best of the C5, or intact-legged, riders who have suddenly emerged in this class as a limb-impaired rider in the C4 category. Inexplicably, they have suddenly appeared in this injury class, barely a year before the Paris Paralympics,” says Eduard Novak, pointing out the crux of the problem.
DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND As he explained, there are currently several difficult-to-understand decisions. “Ten years ago, the five classes listed in para cycling included 90% of athletes with limb deficiencies. In recent years, however, they have been replaced by riders with minimal disabilities, who have been ‘allowed’ into these categories by the UCI classification committee. Today, the trend has completely reversed and athletes with limb impairments now account for only about 10% of para cyclists,” says Novak.
NO POSSIBILITY TO APPEAL But even more worrying, says Novak, is the fact that athletes or their national federations have no possibility to appeal against classifications that seem unfair. Although an athlete can challenge his or her own classification through the national Paralympic committee, he or she cannot complain about the unjustified performance of another competitor in any forum.
LACK OF TRANSPARENCY He continues: “There is also a problem with the lack of transparency on these classifications: there is currently no objective information or medical justification available to the outside world as to why people with seemingly hardly injured limbs are put in the same category as athletes with prostheses.”
NO BREAKTHROUGH Novak, who was also the president of his country’s cycling federation, added that he has done his best to push for transparency, but all his proposals have been brushed aside by the authorities, one way or another. “I’ve been a member of the UCI Para-Cycling Commission for seven years but I have not managed to achieve a breakthrough that would have moved things in the direction of transparency and clarity in the classification procedures.
PRESSURE OF SPORTS POLITICS “Unfortunately, I feel that the pressure of sports politics is too strong and the Paris Paralympics have become an event where the real sports superpowers want to impose their interests. It’s worth looking at the list of those who won the C5 category for 2022, they are now mainly competing in the C4 category. What the spectators in Paris will see from this is that most of the dozens of riders will be competing with intact limbs, and 2-3 will be competing with prosthetic limbs, as if they have mistaken where they should be competing. This is disappointing and calls into question the fundamental aim of allowing athletes with a genuine disability, who have lost limbs due to a birth defect or who have already suffered major trauma in an accident, to compete in the Paralympics among people with similar conditions,” says Eduard Novák, who will compete in all road and track cycling events in Paris and and can only hope to have a fair competition in the French capital.