Paralympics

BUSINESS DAY, 2 NOVEMBER 2000

I AM NOT SURE what it says about us as a sporting nation that over the past four years our Olympic performance has subsided while our Paralympians have improved their medal haul by about 30 per cent. I am not sure that I want to think too deeply on the matter, although I do know that it will make me far less likely to curse and hurl unmerited threats at absent polio sufferers the next time I screech into a vacant parking bay, only to discover that taunting yellow wheelchair painted on the tarmac.

Ooh, they infuriate me, those yellow-painted wheelchairs, but I suppose it is all in a good cause. Walking an extra 500m with an armful of shopping is a small price to pay for an additional gold medal or two.

For the Paralympians to train and qualify and compete at the games is indeed a fine achievement and an example in endurance and fortitude to those of us who are too quick to grumble and whimper when we misplace the remote control and have to get up off the couch to change channels manually, but the coverage of the games provided the keen observer with other more profound lessons about human nature.

For a certain lazy kind of writer, it has been easy to eulogise the men and women of the Paralympics as models of moral rectitude, shining examples of all that we could or should be. The ideal of Olympic sportsmanship is long dead, and the sentimental tendency is to transfer that idealism onto the Paralympics.

If you are a one-legged shot-putter, or an armless butterfly swimmer, the suggestion goes, you are somehow necessarily lit by a purer and more noble flame. You are different in fundamental ways from a two-legged putter of the shot: you are more morally admirable. This is, of course, a patronising nonsense.

As the Paralympians themselves would be first to remind us, a human being with a physical disability is still a human being, subject to the same weaknesses and temptations as the rest of us. If anything, the Paralympics were riven with even more scandals and squabbles than the Olympics. The power-lifters demonstrated that theirs is a sport that, across the spectrum of physical challenges, attracts the kind of dimwit who cannot figure out how far in advance of the competition to stop taking performance-enhancing drugs. Similarly, scarcely an event went by without protests and accusations that this or that medallist was not quite as disabled as he or she was officially registered as being. There are subtle gradations of disability invisible to the naked eye, but evident to the partially sighted one.

My favourite cheating wheeze, though, is the practice of “boosting”, in which, if newspapers are to be believed, athletes put their nether regions to excruciating torture in order that the body’s release of adrenaline will boost their performances. This is obviously only feasible if one has no sensation below the waist, but some of the more grisly practices included nailing one’s genitals to the wheelchair, twisting elastic bands around the testicles and blocking off catheters so that the bladder fills to capacity. Not the sort of thing you would expect to find Stephen Hawking doing while mulling over an especially tricky equation.

I found it all weirdly comforting. It reinforced what we all should already know: a person in a wheelchair is not a different kind of person from you or me; it is you or me in a wheelchair, just as courageous, cowardly and sneaky as we are, just as weak and strong as everyone else. Congratulations for the medals, Amakrokokroko. You made us proud.