The Paralympic flag is the restless younger sibling of the Olympic flag. Where Pierre de Coubertin's five rings have flown essentially unchanged since 1920, the Paralympic symbol has been through four versions in three decades: five Korean tae-geuks, then three, then the swooping agitos of 2004, then a geometric redraw in 2019. The churn tells the story of a movement that spent its early years negotiating its identity, first with a host country, then with the IOC's lawyers, and finally with its own ambitions. The current flag is a white field with three curved strokes, red, blue and green, wheeling around a single point.
Five tae-geuks in Seoul
The Paralympic Games predate their flag by decades. Competitions for wheelchair athletes began at Stoke Mandeville hospital in England in 1948, and the first Games now counted as Paralympic were held in Rome in 1960. But the movement went to Seoul in 1988 without a unifying symbol of its own, and the first Paralympic flag was born there.
Its building block was the pa, a comma-shaped stroke from traditional Korean design; two pa interlock to form the tae-geuk, the red and blue disc at the center of South Korea's national flag. The 1988 symbol took five of these strokes, colored them blue, black, red, yellow and green like the Olympic rings, and arranged them in a similar two-row pattern. It was a graceful piece of flattery to the host nation and a deliberate echo of the Olympic brand, and the second part was the problem.
The IOC objects
The International Olympic Committee guards its five rings as aggressively as any mark on earth, and it viewed the five tae-geuks as too close for comfort. As the newly founded International Paralympic Committee (established in 1989) negotiated cooperation agreements with the IOC in the early 1990s, the symbol became a sticking point. The compromise was subtraction: a version with three tae-geuks, in red, blue and green, formally launched in 1994. Sources differ on exactly when the cut was agreed, with the IPC dating the three-stroke mark within the movement to 1991, but the five tae-geuk flag's public life effectively ended with the transition. The slimmed-down symbol came with the motto "Mind, Body, Spirit," the three strokes conveniently matching the three words.
Agitos
By 2003 the IPC wanted a mark that said something about Paralympic sport itself rather than an inherited motif from one host city. It commissioned the Berlin-based agency Scholz and Friends, which kept the three elements and the three colors but bent them into asymmetric crescents sweeping around a central point, like bodies in orbit. The new symbol was named the agitos, from the Latin agito, "I move." The colors stayed red, blue and green on the stated ground that these are the three colors most widely used in the world's national flags, a quieter version of Coubertin's old claim that his rings' palette covered every nation.
The agitos were unveiled at the closing ceremony of the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games, during the flag handover from Athens to Beijing, together with a new motto, "Spirit in Motion." Torino 2006 was the first Games fully branded with the new mark. The enclosing circle implied by the three strokes is meant to hold athletes from all corners of the world together, and the mark's forward lean gives the flag an unusual property among the world's banners: it looks like it is moving even when the wind is not.
The 2019 redraw
In October 2019, around the IPC's thirtieth anniversary, the agitos were revised rather than replaced. The original 2003 drawing was slightly irregular: the three elements differed in size and did not rotate around a true common center. The 2019 version made each agito the same size and set all three orbiting a single central point, and the colors were brightened to use the same Pantone shades as the red, blue and green of the Olympic rings, visually aligning the two Games' brands. The refresh arrived with a broader rebrand and a new tagline, "Change Starts with Sport," which replaced "Spirit in Motion" after fifteen years.
The flag itself follows Olympic-style protocol. It is raised at each opening ceremony, lowered at the close, and passed from the mayor of the host city to the mayor of the next, the same ritual the Olympic flag has used since 1920 (that flag's story is elsewhere on this site). The agitos are IPC property and a protected trademark, licensed to organizing committees and sponsors under detailed brand rules. Between the copyright, the trademarks and four redesigns in thirty years, the Paralympic flag is one of the most tightly managed pieces of cloth in sport, and also one of the few whose entire design history fits within living memory of a single career: an athlete who competed under the five tae-geuks in Seoul could have watched the 2019 agitos rise at Tokyo.
References
[1] International Paralympic Committee, "No. 18: The Agitos, the Paralympic symbol is unveiled." https://www.paralympic.org/feature/no-18-agitos-paralympic-symbol-unveiled
[2] International Paralympic Committee, "Paralympic Logo: Agitos, Symbol of the Paralympic Movement." https://www.paralympic.org/logo
[3] "Paralympic symbols," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralympic_symbols
[4] Disabled World, "Paralympic Symbol History: From Tae-Geuks to Agitos." https://www.disabled-world.com/sports/paralympics/symbol.php