Finland participated in the inaugural Paralympic Games in 1960 in Rome, with a single representative, swimmer Tauno Valkama - who won gold in his sole event, the 50m crawl.

The country was absent from the 1964 Games, but returned in 1968, and has participated in every subsequent edition of the Summer Paralympics.

[1] Finland's 'awakening' to the Paralympics came in 1976, both at the inaugural Winter Games (where it finished third on the medal chart), and at the Summer Games, where it won fifty medals - forty-seven more than it had at the previous summer edition.

The country performed strongly throughout the 1980s, then began to decline, in terms of both medal hauls and ranking.

At the 2006 Winter Games, Finland failed to win a single medal; the country won only a silver and a bronze in 2010.