Wheelchairs in Sports
After World War II, wheelchair sports began to gain in popularity. Since the 1940s, there have been high-level wheelchair athletics programs; basketball and racing are probably the best-established but today there are also hockey, rugby, fencing, billiards, football, bowling, tennis, curling, sailing, skiing, volleyball and more.
The need of athletes for high-performance Wheelchairs drove innovation; the big old clunky hospital-style chairs would not remain the only option for long. In 1979 Marilyn Hamilton, Jim Okamoto, and Don Helmanproduced a mass-market lightweight folding wheelchair called the "Quickie"; its design and its sexier name revolutionized manual wheelchair manufacturing and marketing. In 1984, George Murray became the first wheelchair athlete to be featured on the Wheaties cereal box.
