大象传媒

Well it鈥檚 been a remarkable summer for sport 鈥� the Euros, Wimbledon, international cricket, the Olympics, and now, starting today, the Paralympics.

Yet some might consider the Paralympics, at the tail end of the summer, to not be as important. But I鈥檝e been hooked since 2012, when I attended the London Paralympics opening ceremony. The atmosphere, the skill of the athletes, the competitiveness 鈥� they all made for sport as exciting as the earlier Olympic Games.

The first official Paralympic Games was held in Rome in 1960 with the games at first only open to athletes in wheelchairs. Then, from 1976 people with different disabilities, whether genetic, or caused by illness or accidents, were included. Yet TV only offered taped, not live coverage, and it took until 2000 in Sydney for coverage comparable to the main Olympics.

Now, this year, there will 1,300 hours of live Paralympics TV coverage. But how much of a lasting impact will the 12 days of the Games have on attitudes to the disabled? There鈥檚 certainly been some progress in recent times, if you think of the car parking spaces for the disabled and the provision of disabled public loos. But what happened to Paralympian Tanni Grey Thompson on Monday highlights how poor the treatment of people with particular needs can still be: Tanni had to crawl off her train when the assistance on the platform 鈥� and to which she has every right 鈥� failed to be offered by the train company.

So the Games shed a different light on disability with it being viewed as something challenging rather than something problematic. Indeed sometimes the Paralympians have been marketed by the media as superhumans. But Dame Sarah Storey, who was born without a functioning left hand, and who already has 17 gold Paralympic medals for swimming and for cycling, rejected that description in a Radio Times interview, saying disabled people need to be enabled to live their best life, not be patronised. In other words, they deserve the respect that any human being should be given.

Perhaps Christian thinking might help here, with its theology of a God who loves each and every one of us, regardless of ability or talent. 鈥淭here is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus鈥�, St Paul wrote. In other words, each one of us has an inherent equality, an inherent dignity.

Show less