More than medals: The real race for Paralympic athletes

The Paralympics, the latest edition of which is about to start in Paris, are sometimes seen as a pure embodiment of the Olympic spirit. But the event faces a whole set of difficulties of its own. Let’s take a Deep Dive.

?? The Paralympic Games are the third-largest sporting event in the world, but its athletes face various unique challenges.

?? For one thing, they have to fight to be taken seriously as athletes, amid the widespread patronising clichés about the triumph of the human spirit and everyone being a winner.

?? The Paralympics also faces a lot of the same problems as the Olympics when it comes to cheating but with the extra dimension of people pretending to be more disabled than they are in order to compete in categories where they’re more likely to win.

QUOTABLE

“The Paralympics defined my life, but they also reach into homes, redefining public perception of what’s possible.” — Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, 11-time Paralympic gold medallist and UK parliamentarian

BY THE NUMBERS

4,400 people There will be 4,400 competitors at the Paris 2024 Paralympics, compared to 10,714 at the recent Olympics. The first Paralympics in Rome in 1960, attracted just 400 athletes.

$12,000 However, competing doesn’t come cheap. For US athletes, the cost averages $12,000 per year.

55 US swimmer Trischa Zorn won 55 medals, including 41 golds, over seven editions of the Paralympic Games, making her its most successful athlete ever.

QUIZ

How many TV viewers did the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics attract, setting a new record?

A. 3.25 billion

B. 4.25 billion

C. 5.25 billion

Scroll to the bottom for the answer.

DID YOU KNOW?

Doping is a problem in all sports, but with parasports, there’s an additional technological dimension to it: so-called gene doping.

THE EDIT

?? No medals for taking part. There’s a big difference between competing and participating. Here’s how the language used to describe Paralympians can patronise and undermine them.

?? Insults to injuries? The Games’ official TikTok account has been accused of mocking Paralympians, even though it’s run by a Paralympian.

?? No, honestly, it hurts. Policing who qualifies for which category at the Paralympics is a thankless task, and there are many who game the system. Most famously, Spain’s basketball team at the 2000 Games.

? Paris is learning. One unambiguous benefit of the 2024 Games is that they’ve made a previously unaccessible city a lot easier for disabled people to get around.

WATCH

The biggest problem with the Paralympics, according to Paralympic swimmer Will Perry, is what happens in the four years between the Games.

MAP

A map of countries that have hosted the Paralympics shows that huge swaths of the planet have never done so.

THE FULL PICTURE

The number of Paralympians testing positive for banned substances peaked in Sydney in 2000, but remains pretty low.

KEY PLAYER

Ludwig Guttmann

Ludwig Guttmann remains the most influential figure in the history of the Paralympic movement. In 1948, the German-British doctor organised the first Stoke Mandeville Games, the Paralympics’ predecessor, initially as a rehabilitation exercise for pilots injured during the Second World War.

HONOUREE TO KNOW

Yip Pin Xiu

Yip Pin Xiu is a five-time Singaporean Paralympic swimming gold medallist. She also went into politics from 2018 to 2020, serving as a Singapore Member of Parliament to address issues such as sports and inclusion, workplace harassment and sexual violence on campus.

ONE FINAL THING

There might well be cheating at the Paralympics, but sometimes suspected cases turn out not to be what they seem.

NEXT TIME

The answer to the quiz is B (4.25 million).