I Love The Paralympics, But Let's Not Kid Ourselves
The Paralympics is always a wonderful spectacle—but let's be honest: they won't change anything for disabled people.
Welcome back to Paris. For a week and a half—starting this Wednesday—spectators will have the opportunity to watch elite athletes achieve remarkable things at the 2024 Summer Paralympics. Around the world, viewers will no doubt harbor and voice unsolicited opinions about sports that, up until now, they barely knew existed. And for disabled people? This is our once-every-few-years chance to see people who look, sound and move like us on TV.
The games, of course, mean different things to different people. But to me, as a wheelchair user and disability advocate, one thing is clear: What happens this summer in Paris will not amount to a “breakthrough.” Despite the cringey rhetoric and vapid promises used in marketing campaigns and beyond, the next few days are not about to eradicate the generally crappy treatment of disabled people in society. Every four years an over-excited media has the audacity to suggest that this time, these Paralympics, the needle will finally move. Alas, the overwhelming evidence indicates that no, it most certainly will not.
My prediction is based on experience. I was a lonely disabled teenager when the 2012 Paralympics came to London, my home town. There was genuine excitement that the tickets had sold well, which is far from guaranteed, and I watched the spectacle in the dying days of my last school summer holiday. But I returned to the classroom to find that none of my peers had done the same, and over the next few years it became clear that a Paralympic legacy for disabled Londoners was not about to materialize.
These days, through work as a disability advocate, I talk a lot about disabled people’s history and how we’ve achieved change in the past. On a surprisingly regular basis, people ask me “if 2012 helped” or “changed things.” I must confess, it can be hard not to scoff and roll my eyes. That’s because it is hard to think of 2012 and not think of what came next: years of austerity that dismantled vital services for disabled people (affecting everything from the care sector to education for disabled kids), and the UN’s repeated warnings that these measures violated disabled people’s rights. This was accompanied by government rhetoric that painted us as benefits scroungers, workshy and, as the Covid pandemic ultimately proved, expendable. There’s a reason that, when then-Chancellor George Osborne took part in a medal ceremony during the 2012 Games, the crowd booed. Indeed, for many disabled people, that moment became one of the defining memories of London’s Paralympics—it seemed to sum up the mood. Twelve years later, the idea that the Games meaningfully changed anything for disabled people in London, or the rest of the UK for that matter, has evolved from being ridiculous to downright farcical. If anything, things have become worse.
When I point this out to the people who ask me if London changed things, they can get defensive. They sometimes retort that you can hardly blame a supposed failure of the Paralympic movement for the actions of a hostile national government. But, in a funny way, that is exactly the point I’m making: if it’s ludicrous to expect a sporting event to change government policy, isn’t it even more ludicrous to expect that it would change anything, at least not substantially. Imagine having enough faith in humanity to believe that eleven days of (admittedly brilliant) sport could possibly counter—what?—several centuries of ableism. Must be nice.
This is not to say that the Paralympics are not a good thing. Of course the on-screen representation of successful disabled people with a variety of impairments is a welcome change from our near-total absence in regular programming. No one should argue that it’s not. The problem is the pervasive myth that somehow the increasing popularity of Paralympic sport means the rest of our problems are solved. Not even close.
So what hopes are there for Paris? Even before the Paralympic opening ceremony begins, things have not exactly been looking good. While acknowledging some progress, especially regarding the city’s bus network, campaigners, and even the president of the International Paralympic Committee, have criticized a failure to improve access to the metro in time for the Games. Only one of the system’s eleven lines is functionally and easily usable for wheelchair users. But perhaps even more dispiriting has been the chorus of voices—commenters and spectators alike—who declared the end of our summer of sport as soon as the lights went out on the Olympic closing ceremony. Many had to be reminded that, in fact, another great sporting delight was just around the corner. A week before the Paralympics were due to begin, tickets for main events—including some athletics finals and the opening ceremony—were still available. It’s a huge shame that spectators still fail to realize that, representation and everything else aside, Paralympic sport is as entertaining as its Olympic counterpart.
The Paralympics are great. More people should watch and enjoy them. But let’s please stop asking disability activists if they represent anything more than a good sporting occasion. To expect anything more is to ignore what the evidence tells us and to instead adopt wilful naivety. Real change, the type we might wish the Paralympics would bring, requires us to face the facts—and the scale of the challenge.
Lucy Webster is a journalist, author and disability activist. Her work focuses on demystifying disability and dismantling ableism. Her debut book, The View From Down Here, is a memoir about life lived at the intersection of ableism and sexism.
Lucy Webster
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