Start of the Paralympics: Disabled sports complain about a lack of support

Jörg Wedde has gotten used to doing his sport when others are sleeping. Not that he finds it particularly useful, “from a sports medicine perspective, that’s nonsense,” he says. But for years he has had no other choice. Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m., that is the training time for his team, the Ice Lions Hannover, the German para-ice hockey champions.

Wedde, 60, will be the oldest German participant at the Paralympics in Milan and Cortina, he is still an indispensable member of the national team. Together with monoskier Anna-Lena Forster, he forms the flag-bearer duo of the German team. However, Forster and Wedde, like the flag bearers of the other nations, will not enter the Verona Arena, but will only be seen in previously recorded clips at the opening ceremony on Friday evening. Forster has her first downhill race on Saturday in Cortina, Wedde has her first preliminary round game on the same day.

There are probably few people like Wedde who, with so much personal experience, can speak of a sport that has a niche existence in the niche. This also explains the late training: Beyond the professional leagues, it is difficult to organize ice times in Germany. This was already an issue at the Olympics when it came to the everyday life of the German national players. And this applies even more to the Paralympic version of ice hockey, in which the athletes sit in a sled and push themselves off the ice with two short sticks.

The fact that in the months before the Paralympics there was a debate about the difficult conditions under which the German national ice hockey team was preparing for the Paralympics was initially due to the team’s surprising qualification: the first in 20 years, with an unexpected fifth place at the World Championships in May 2025. This means that 17 ice hockey players now belong to the German delegation’s squad of 40 athletes. And so a disparity became particularly clear, which the German Disabled Sports Association (DBS) drew attention to in a confrontational statement last November.

“Too few places: No fair support for para sports,” the association wrote on its website at the time. Core of the criticism: While there are “around 1,700 funding places for Olympic athletes, with almost 620 participants” in the Summer and Winter Olympics, there are only 160 funding places available in Para sports with around 200 athletes. This meant those places for which the Deutsche Sporthilfe Foundation gives top athletes the highest basic amounts – between 700 and 800 euros per month.

For comparison, the DBS referred to the situation abroad: In Australia, a quarter of the competitive sports budget goes to Paralympic sports, while in the athlete promotion in France, this benefits from 23 percent of the funding places. In Germany, according to the association’s calculations, in many areas not even ten percent of the resources are earmarked for para sports. Activist spokeswoman Mareike Miller concluded: “This can neither be the goal nor the claim of the athlete funding funded by the federal government and the German Sports Aid Foundation with many millions of euros.”

Sporthilfe explains that the funding volume for para sports has “more than doubled”.

At Sporthilfe they felt they were being unfairly put in the spotlight. When distributing its funds, the foundation bases its distribution on the squads in which the specialist associations of Olympic and Paralympic sports group their athletes in this country. Roughly speaking, the associations differentiate between Olympic, prospective and junior squads. Similarly, Sporthilfe offers three funding pillars: top team (800 euros per month), potential team (700 euros) and talent team (75 euros).

However, the grouping of athletes into these teams doesn’t always work out that way. Because Sporthilfe has a finite budget made up of funds from sponsors and the federal government. At the same time, it is not uncommon for sports associations to add new Olympic and, above all, promising squad athletes – for example, when new sports join the competition program or the specialist associations change their structures. In order to meet demand, Sporthilfe is capping the top and potential funding places. Even in the Olympic associations, not all prospective squad athletes receive potential team funding.

In the case of the para ice hockey players, the DBS team was not nominated for top team funding at the beginning of 2025. Inclusion in the current year is not possible, even after a surprising qualification for the Paralympics. The main criticism of the DBS is that there is no flexibility in nominations due to the small number of funding places.

Sporthilfe, on the other hand, pointed out that the funding volume for para sports has “more than doubled” since 2019. And the foundation accommodated the DBS with a few more highest funding bodies, instead of 160 there are now 168. On the other hand, they are “constantly trying to acquire even more money from the economy,” says Sporthilfe board member Maximilian Hartung. But it wouldn’t work without help from politics, which is why they recently asked for even more government funding for the 2026 budget year in order to increase the monthly funding amounts for athletes – without success.

Just before the Paralympics, almost 200 German para-athletes, together with the Athletes Germany Representation, called for these funding amounts to be taken into account in the federal budget for 2027. In this way, “at least 200” of the most highly endowed funding places at Sporthilfe for para-athletes should be secured “for several years”.

The ice hockey players, who only received the talent team amount of 75 euros per month until December 2025, have now been receiving the more coveted 700 euros since the beginning of 2026. On the one hand, it was great news for the players, “we’ve never had that before,” says Jörg Wedde, the team’s veteran. For example, it helps to finance the material for the sport: a sled costs around 1,600 euros, and the players also buy the rackets themselves; Wedde expects it to cost around two and a half thousand euros per year.

The joint preparation took place over half a dozen weekends

On the other hand, the funding in January came too late for the players to be able to talk to their employers about reducing working hours and increasing the training workload. The joint preparation took place over half a dozen weekends; the new coach Peter Willmann didn’t have much more time to convey his ideas to the team.

In 2006, when the team took part in the Paralympics for the last time, things were different, says Wedde. At that time, a sponsor was found to finance a high-altitude training camp in Colorado, where the German team temporarily prepared together with the US national team. The Turin Games came close to winning a medal, with Germany finishing fourth after losing to the USA in the bronze medal game.

Meanwhile, the USA, Germany’s second opponent in the preliminary round in Milan, are “two classes ahead”, as coach Willmann says. And China, the opening opponent on Saturday (1.35 p.m.) and fourth in the World Cup, also needs to be assessed a class better. The third group opponent is host Italy. What is better this time than 20 years ago? For example, there will be live streams of all games, says Wedde. After all, it’s not just about results, but about promoting your sport. So that in the future there may be more ice rink operators who prepare their ice for para sports – or even, currently the absolute exception, create barrier-free conditions for the athletes.

Wedde can name a total of four ice rinks in Germany where you can get from the bench to the ice barrier-free and the boards are transparent. Only then can substitutes or those in the penalty box look at the ice. The rule is that the substitutes do not leave the ice, but park on the edge.

Advertising for the sport ideally means that the German para ice hockey national players will become a few more. At the current five clubs in the German Para-Ice Hockey League, “everyone who comes” to play sports after an accident is taken, says Wedde: “Sometimes I think we could get money from the state simply because we give people the courage to live again and replace a psychotherapist.”

Wedde himself lost his legs in a train accident at the age of twelve. For a long time, he says, he couldn’t find a sport that interested him. Until he found out about para ice hockey. He began his sporting career, which is not yet over at the age of 60, at the age of 37.