The Paris Paralympics are here the first games in Europe since London 2012. I'm intrigued as to how it will go, because I believe these Games will provide an important gauge of where the Paralympic movement is at, testing both the awareness of disability sport and of disability issues in general.
I still think London 2012 was a bit of an anomaly because of what Seb Coe did with LoCog and Channel 4 with the broadcasting. There was a lot of clever advertising around it, using the fact that we in the UK love a touch of cheeky humour.
It pushed at taboos, asking: what can we say about disability? Do we have to tiptoe around it? And it allowed disabled people to have a voice, to relay our point of view. One of the perspectives people had never really grasped before was the fact that, as disabled people, we take the piss out of each other. We gave C4 permission to go with that. I think this approach elevated the Paralympics in London and we haven't really had a chance to test the acceptance of disability sport or its popularity in Europe since then.
So I won't be looking only at the numbers that come to watch in Paris. That depends a lot on how much the French have been prepared to publicise the Paralympics and how creative they've been trying to get the message out.
This story is from the August 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the August 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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