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Intellectual disability athletes will find out next month if they can compete at the London 2012 Paralympics.
They have been banned since it was found that most of Spain's intellectual disability basketball team at the 2000 Sydney Paralympics were not disabled.
The International Sports Federation for Persons with an Intellectual Disability (Inas-Fid) has been working with the International Paralympic Committee.
They have jointly proposed a motion to next month's IPC General Assembly.
The motion calls on the assembly to acknowledge the progress that has been made by the joint IPC/Inas-Fid working group and that the criteria for the reintroduction of athletes with an intellectual disability to Paralympic Games has been met.
It also requests that athletes are eligible to compete in their respective International Federation-sanctioned competition, including London 2012.
The General Assembly takes place in Kuala Lumpar from 19-22 November.
"Having the IPC Governing Board so positively associated with this motion will send a very powerful signal to the entire IPC membership," said Inas-Fid president Dr Bob Price.
"However, nothing is guaranteed and we must not be complacent."
Intellectual disability athletes were barred from competing at both the Athens and Beijing Games but a team of seven swimmers are part of the GB team at the IPC European Swimming Championships in Iceland which draw to a close on Saturday - the first IPC event at which British intellectual disability athletes have been allowed to compete.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From BBC News:
