Movement is encounter

Kerstin Stopp

How do you integrate properly? How do you break down prejudices? And does being disabled also mean being in need of help? Kerstin Stopp, Chairwoman of the Association for the Promotion of Integration through Sport, deals with these questions. After a serious accident as a sports student, she herself had to reorganise her life and, above all, change the way she thought it would be. This personal stroke of fate showed her that the greatest good is to preserve one's independence. The experience still characterises her today and gave her the positive strength to help others through sport, exercise and awareness and to reintegrate herself into society.

You are the chairwoman of the Association for the Promotion of Integration through Sport. How did you come to found the association?
Kerstin Stopp: The starting point was the games and sports festival for people with mental and multiple disabilities, which has been taking place since the mid-1990s. The increasing demands on the organisation team and the whole surrounding area soon made it necessary for us to found an association, which has now been in existence since 2001.

What goals has the association set itself?
We are not interested in gaining members, but in organising and holding various events that bring different groups together: Projects for senior citizens, the swimming meet or the joint sporting activities of top athletes and disabled people. It is important to me that fears of contact are broken down.

You are a qualified teacher with special training in rehabilitation sports. Why did you specialise in water sports?
I have learnt to control my movements and walking again in the water. There are certain pieces of equipment that can be used very well in the water. I have also introduced my own ideas and use equipment that is otherwise not so well known. For example, leg cuffs, which force you to straighten your entire body through awareness and deep muscles. Due to my own injury, I had a good sense of what was needed. I read a lot, attended training courses, talked and tried things out.

What challenges arise when doing sport together?
It's very important to be sensitive to everyone. You bring people together who would otherwise hardly ever meet. You have to adapt to the individual groups, whether they are senior citizens, disabled people or competitive athletes. Sport is the easiest way to approach each other because there are no major barriers to contact or understanding. Everyone is equal in swimming. Disabled people are nothing special, they don't need special treatment. That is very important for me to convey.

So is sport the ultimate means of integration?
In my opinion, we are selling integration completely wrong. For example, if you have a child with a disability in your class, everyone feels that you have to help the child a lot, tie their shoelaces, carry their schoolbag and look after them all the time. I haven't integrated anyone either when I put a disabled person somewhere and say, "Here's a disabled person.
It would be much better to let them do everything on their own and deal with it as normal. Of course, I have to bring a lot of knowledge about the medical background to this special work and always include and take this into account in my work. That means only helping them when they explicitly need help. Not giving people with disabilities special status is the hardest thing for people.
I don't think we'll manage to get rid of that in the next few years. We've been brought up wrong for that. As long as we only perceive a disabled person as a disabled person, the way we treat them will not change.

What needs to happen for people to rethink the way they treat people with disabilities?
Normality must be introduced. The special status characteristic must disappear. A person is a person. We all have some kind of limitation: One person is afraid of something, another is insecure about their appearance. Nobody wants to put these "limitations" centre stage. If you can't do certain things, and everyone has them, then you try to work around them. And every disabled person feels the same way. This must be perceived as normal by society. Of course, this raises the question of what is normal? The point is that everyone has their own path, and some people have a different one.

What does sport achieve that school or society might not in terms of integration?
Movement is the decisive factor. If everyone sits in their own place at school or on a course, there is always this internal barrier to getting up, going and speaking up. But if you stand in the water together with the same problem and do exercises, you have already broken down many of the barriers. Other areas don't manage that so well. Exercise is an encounter.

Swimming training for school classes, disabled people, rehabilitation groups and competitive athletes: Kerstin Stopp works with an extremely broad spectrum of people. And yet everyone is the same in the water. She rigorously mixes the group members in order to reduce any fear of contact. Senior citizens do aqua jogging with mentally disabled people or school classes train together with basketball players from the Niners. "But it's nothing special. There are lots of people who do good things," emphasises Kerstin Stopp modestly.

Is it a job or more of a vocation?
It's definitely not just a job for me. There's a piece of my own life story in it. But I've noticed that this is fading these days. Some people just see it as a job to earn money. But it's more than just working through things that someone asks you to do. You have to think about your work and what you do on a daily basis, reflect on yourself.

What characterises your daily work?
Always taking small steps to try and involve everyone in everyday life. I try to find ways to bring out the strengths of disabled people. But that's normal for me. My day-to-day work is actually completely unspectacular.

You have been working with disabled people for over 40 years. How has the way disabled people are treated in sport changed?
When I started in 1978, it was relatively frowned upon to do sport with disabled people. I was the new kid on the block in many ways. In GDR times, I was disciplined for going to the swimming pool with mentally disabled people. I got a really bad punishment back then too. And that was only because I had allowed myself to go swimming with disabled people and their parents in my free time.

Shortly before reunification, things slowly changed and I was actually instructed to swim with the disabled.
After reunification, there was a lot of hype about disabled sports. Many athletes like Maria Götze from Chemnitz celebrated great successes. [The swimmer is still the most successful disabled sportswoman in the region today, having won 49 medals at the Paralympics]. There were many new opportunities for further training in this field. I used the time to get my rehabilitation sports licence.

And what is the situation today?
I have the feeling that disability sport has become very commercialised these days. You have to be careful that the whole thing doesn't tip over and become just an elite sport again, leaving the general public out in the cold. There aren't as many disabled sports clubs as there should be. In Chemnitz in particular, the BFV Ascota is outstandingly committed, but even here there is an increasing lack of motivated volunteers. The demand is very high, but unfortunately we can't cover as much as we need to.

Chemnitz is bidding to become the European Capital of Culture 2025. What do you want for the future of Chemnitz?
Chemnitz definitely needs a push. All the negative things that have come up now have ruined things. We need to see the heart of Chemnitz again. There's no point in trying to bring something about by force. The city has to do it with heart, like many motivated people who live in this city.