London 2012 – The Paralympics

I mentioned in a previous blog that I’m not really that bothered about the actual sport of the Summer Olympics. Over the past seven weeks, I’ve come to realize that this event is not really about the sport, it’s about the athletes and the parathletes, the heroes and the characters who have instilled in all of us a brimming nationalistic pride, inspiration and absolute awe.

Months ago, when I didn’t manage to secure any tickets to the London 2012 Olympics, I immediately applied for the next best thing – tickets to the London 2012 Paralympics. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking about the sport and the athletes, but about getting my chance to stand in the Olympic Park and be a part of the amazing experience of living in a city that is host to the Games.

Those tickets, purchased at random many months ago, gave me a phenomenal introduction to disabled sport. I had chosen a Friday night in the Athletics Stadium and a full Saturday day-pass, both over the first weekend of the Paralympic Games.

Just climbing up through the stands of the stadium, where so many Olympic dreams had already come true, was reward enough. But then, as the sky above the stadium turned to a vibrant pink and the air cooled way down, we watched Hannah Cockroft win Britain’s first track and field gold medal of the 2012 Paralympics, finishing the women’s T34 100-metre race in a world-record breaking 18.05 seconds (she would win gold in the T34 200-metre the next week); we saw Dave Weir qualify for the men’s T54 800-metre, the final of which would garner him one of his four gold medals later in the week; and we even saw Canadian Virginia McLachlan win a bronze medal in the women’s T35 200-metre final.

The next day I headed back to the Olympic Park with some friends. We had £10 day passes, which – depending on availability – would allow us access to a variety of sites. I came home nine hours later, thoroughly exhausted but still buzzing with excitement, after watching goalball, seven-a-side football, and both men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball.

The goalball was the most unique to watch, as it is a sport played only by parathletes, so I had never seen anything remotely like it before. There are three blind players on each team, lined up on either side of a court, guarding a shoulder-height net the width of the court. The audience is kept strictly quiet (a real struggle for me), as the players listen for a bell in the ball and the vibration as its moves across the floor, trying to stop it from entering their net.

Next, we headed out to the Riverbank Arena for a stunning view of the Park and a truly humbling match between the Ukraine and the US in seven-a-side (cerebral palsy) footie. And then, we set up at the Basketball Arena, where I was thrilled to get to first watch a men’s wheelchair basketball game (Germany vs Japan) and then the Canadian women’s team take on Australia. I was draped in my Canada flag and seated next to the Cape Breton parents of one of the players, and I cheered the ladies to a 55-50 victory. What an unforgettable day!

Now, I consider myself very lucky to have got those tickets, to have seen the Paralympic sport and to experience a side of the Games, which unfortunately, I don’t think a great deal of other people around the globe got to experience.

The final medal tally for Team GB yesterday was 34 golds, 43 silvers and 43 bronzes. The US came away with 31 golds, 29 silvers and 38 bronzes, while Canada finished with seven golds, 15 silvers and nine bronzes. While I am very proud of the Canadian team, the fact that I live in the UK right now is the only way I got to see full coverage of the Games.

In the US, for instance, the events are deemed not worth televising, with only a few hours of round-up broadcast on US channels throughout the event, and a lot of the sports not scheduled to be shown until the whole thing ended last night.

Very little coverage was shown in Canada either. The Opening Ceremony, which took place on 29 August, was broadcast on CTV on 1 September. A daily highlights show, which rounded up the day’s performances, medal winners and athlete interviews, was broadcast each night on TSN2 and Sportsnet. The Closing Ceremony is scheduled to be shown in Canada today (though it was live in London last night).

As to newspaper coverage of the events, only 200 articles were published in Canada between 28 August and 7 September covering the Paralympics, while the Olympics’ coverage, between 26 July and 12 August, in the same newspapers, counted up to 5,488.

In the run-up, the London organising committee made deals with about 90 global broadcasters worth £10 million in revenue, a record for the Paralympics. However, compare the figure with the scale of broadcasting rights for the Olympics – NBC alone paid $4.38 billion last year for its rights to show the Summer and Winter Games through to 2020. I think those figures are shameful.

It was an entirely different story over here in the UK. Granted, we are hosting this thing. And there is an adrenalin rush that lit us all on 26 July and just never left. But that’s just one reason for the UK to show full coverage of the events, not an excuse for other countries not to do so.

In the UK, this year’s Paralympics drew its biggest-ever television audience, and the attendance at the live events didn’t disappoint either. The night I was lucky enough to have tickets to the Olympic Stadium, I was one of 80,000 in a full house. Most other venues were sold out too.

Later in the week, it suddenly occurred to me that I had never watched the Paralympics before. The reason for this? In Canada, it was never broadcast. Or, at least, it was done so in a condensed, easy-to-digest synopsis at the end of each day.

But for London 2012, four weeks after the Olympics’ Closing Ceremony, I can barely remember the able-bodied athletes and their wins, which I followed almost compulsively from early morning to bedtime. My mind is now so full of the faces, the names and the stunning accomplishments of the parathletes that have mesmerized me for the past 11 days.

During the Paralympics, 40 world records were set, and names like Dave Reid, Ellie Simmonds, Jonnie Peacock, Sarah Storey and Richard Whitehead became household names and heroes. And those are just the British athletes.

The motto for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralymic Games was ‘Inspire a Generation’, and I truly believe that – even if you don’t really care about the sport and you do find the money spent for this extravaganza rather over the top – watching the competitors, following their moving stories (a young boy born without his left hand or a young girl born with cerebral palsy, the solider who was blinded by an attack in Afghanistan, the young woman who lost both her legs in the 7/7 attacks on London), and cheering them on to victory is something that will stay with many young Brits for years to come.

Today, both Olympic and Paralympic athletes paraded through the streets of London (the Brits love a good parade), and we have all painfully settled into our London 2012 hangovers. Rio and 2016 can’t come soon enough.