Efforts to integrate and exclude disabled people in mainstream settings raise questions about the appropriateness of integration. This paper explores problematic aspects of the integration of disabled and able-bodied people in the mainstream, and structural conditions affecting the quality of such integration. In particular, it uses a case study of a partially sighted boy’s experiences in different mainstream sport settings to show how integration efforts can be complicated by the ambiguity of an invisible impairment, by the pressures on disabled persons and their families to ignore or deny impairment and disability, and by a mismatching of structural aspects of sports and the abilities of participants with disabilities.
