The goal? To remove any hardware limitations from the equation, so athletes can just be athletes.
There isn’t a lot of money in wheelchair racing, so racing in the Paralympic games is an exercise of carefully choreographed improvisation. Athletes are crammed into their chairs with loose foam. Their gloves are homemade from craft putty. And they have to focus all of their strength and balance into punching their wheels harder and faster than the next guy, to win anything from a 100-meter dash to a full marathon.