“We’re all great athletes!” The Special Olympics social world and the creation of an athlete identity

The ableist imaginary assigns a social identity to intellectually disabled people that renders their impairment the most relevant feature of their lives: as a result, other aspects of their identity are ignored. Leisure participation offers an opportunity for intellectually disabled people to assert a personal identity based on other aspects of their person. The role of social practices is an important but to date overlooked aspect of this. This qualitative study applies Unruh’s (1979, 1980) social world perspective to investigate whether and how involvement with Special Olympics Great Britain (an organization that delivers sports programmes for intellectually disabled people) facilitates intellectually disabled people’s claiming of an athlete identity. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 26 interviewees), half of whom were intellectually disabled (11 were athletes and two were athlete/coaches), and the remainder who were non-disabled (a mixture of club administrators, coaches, volunteers and/or family members). Participant observation was also carried out at training sessions over a period of 3 months as a form of triangulation. Findings have many parallels with studies of non-disabled people’s sports social worlds, but also serve to highlight the complex, fluid and paradoxical nature of disabled identity negotiation.