“The Paralympics Needs To Be More Than an “Afterthought””

The media coverage of the Paralympics has always been appalling and while the Olympics are televised for approximately 8 to 12 hours a day, most of the time- the Paralympics are lucky to be televised in the early hours of the morning- from 12am to 5am .

The Paralmypics is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to children and young people with disabilities what they can do and can achieve, in a world that so often concentrates on what they can’t do.

With no international spectators and limited domestic crowds, the importance placed on broadcasting the Paralympic Games is greater than ever before. When the Games were postponed in 2020, International Paralympic Committee (IPC) President Andrew Parsons argued that the Paralympics were needed more than ever to put disability back at the heart of the inclusion agenda.

With the highest estimated global viewership to date, at 4.25 billion total viewers, Parsons was convinced that media representation of the Paralympic Games would help “change attitudes, breakdown barriers of inequality and create more opportunities for persons with disabilities.”

Despite the positive shift towards representing Paralympians as athletes first, stereotypical ways of covering Paralympians remain dominant in media coverage; this is the most common way they have been represented over the past two decades.

One of the most common stereotypes we saw used was the “supercrip narrative.” This narrative frames disability as an individual problem that a person must “overcome” to achieve success. Paralympians were heralded as “superheroes” because they were able to “overcome” their disabilities to participate in the Paralympic Games. The media often used the word “participate” and not “compete” when describing Paralympians.

An Australian Paralympian has criticised Channel Nine over its TV advertisement for the Paris 2024 Games, saying it fails to "truly represent the Australian people".

The ad features Olympic athletes competing in a variety of sports and ends on a shot of the Paris skyline with the Channel Nine logo and "Your home of the Olympics" over the top. Sadly no Paraympians were included in this advertisement-so how can it be truly representative of all Australian people.

So, is Channel Nine proud to home of the Olympics, but not so proud of being the home of the Paralympics?

Celebrating a Paralympian for “overcoming” their disability in order to “participate” in sport, rather than celebrating them as a high-performance athlete, devalues their athletic performance. This type of narrative perpetuates the idea that any person with a disability can overcome it if they just tried hard enough. This misrepresents the experiences of Paralympians and the everyday lives of people who live with disabilities.

Alongside these stereotypical representations, we also observed that only a select group of people with disabilities tended to be given coverage. Research has demonstrated that athletes with less visible impairments and more innovative technologies, such as wheelchairs or blades, were represented more in coverage than athletes with more visible impairments.

As a result, media coverage conformed to what society thinks an athletic body should look like, and ended up not representing the diversity of bodies and abilities that compete in sport. The issue of what bodies are acceptable at the Games and what ones are shown by the media continues to be hotly debated within the Paralympic movement.

The Paralympic Games have the ability to raise awareness and start important conversations about disability, but it’s important to remember the context of what we are watching and to not homogenize the experience of a Paralympian as the everyday lived experience of people with disabilities.

What’s most important, however, is that conversations about disability, and campaigns such as #WeThe15 — a human rights campaign headed by the IPC and UNESCO to end discrimination against people with disabilities — continue beyond the Paralympics’ two-week life span. Tangible actions, not just rhetoric, need to occur 365 days a year to truly ensure that positive changes are made for people with disabilities across all areas of life.