International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Athletics published a first draft of the medal event programme for Rio, over four years before the competition and with London 2012 still three months away.

Rio 2016 will have a total of 176 athletics medal events, six more than London 2012, with this summer's Paralympics holding 67 medal events for female athletes.

IPC Athletics has been consulting and discussing the proposals with every National Paralympic Committee around the world.

One major change from previous Paralympic Games is a move towards single class throwing events, removing the need for Raza points scoring, a system used to rank athletes in combined class events.

IPC Athletics Sport Technical Committee chairman Ed Warner said: "Our first draft of the Rio 2016 athletics programme aims to create a fair distribution of events covering impairment, gender and event type.


"First and foremost the Paralympic Games are an elite sporting event, so our priority in restructuring the programme was to ensure that we continue to maintain strong competitive fields and, where possible, make them even stronger.

"Inevitably, to create a fair distribution of events some events have had to be removed from the programme.

"This was not done lightly, however, the Sport Technical Committee believe this is a necessary step to meet our objectives.

"The programme is by no means final and we invite National Paralympic Committees to give further feedback.

"Our intention is to finalise the programme by the end of the year to allow athletes, coaches and National Paralympic Committees (NPC) sufficient time to prepare ahead of Rio 2016."

NPCs can now respond by the end of July with feedback on the draft programme.

A final draft is set to be made public on October 15, with further feedback opportunities after that.


The final proposal will be put to the IPC after the Athletics Sport Forum in November, with the governing body approving the programme prior to its publication on New Years' Eve.

The full list of marathon events will not be known though until early 2015 in order for IPC Athletics to increase the number of marathon events so that more impairment groups can be included.

It was also announced that the 2015 World Championship medal events will be based on the Rio 2016 programme, with next year's Worlds in Lyon, France following the format of last year's event in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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