Central to frustrations over the way the Paralympics dominates our thinking about disability is the victim-hero dichotomy it has so often embraced in the past: disabled people have a tragic story, but through sport they are able to triumphantly overcome. The most obvious example of this is the “superhuman” branding introduced by Channel 4 in 2012, which seemed to suggest that Paralympians weren’t just the equals of those in the Olympics – but more tenacious, more courageous, more … alien.
This is “inspiration porn”, Grey-Thompson (above) said. (For proof that these attitudes are still alive and well, see yesterday’s Evening Standard headline: “The inspiration Games”.) “I really dislike any obsession with an overcoming adversity message. It’s a bit like the deserving and undeserving poor message from the 19th century. You don’t expect an average person to be able to do what an Olympian can, so why should it be any different with a disabled person?”
“There’s often focus on the stories of their disabilities,” Webster said. “They’re always tragic, and saved by sport. Part of the huge problem of living as a disabled person is that we’re still seen as fundamentally different, and calling us superhuman reinforces that. What I find deeply annoying is that disability is very rarely the actual problem: the problem is the barriers created by society. A lot of the time, that’s what disabled people have to overcome.”
Not every disabled person faces the same hurdles, Grey-Thompson said. “My dad was an architect, my parents were feisty as hell. I’ve had a lot of privilege. I don’t feel like I overcame a lot of adversity when I was growing up.”
How to tell a better story
Channel 4 has recognised the problem in its past coverage, and taken a different approach this year – you can read more about it in this piece Webster wrote last month. Drawing on the fact that 59% of viewers watch the Paralympics to “see athletes overcoming their disabilities”, the new campaign situates the competitors as battling gravity, friction, and time, just like any other athlete. “She’s doing so well, considering,” one viewer says. “Considering what?” someone else replies.
“I have to give Channel 4 credit,” Webster said. “They held their hands up about ‘superhuman’, and said they got it wrong.” Another campaign, with the support of leading Paralympians including Hannah Cockroft, uses the line: “I won’t be participating at Paris 2024 – I will be competing”.
There is a place for telling the athletes’ stories, as there is in any sports coverage. “You can talk about what a disabled person has experienced, and how some of that has been hard, without making their entire lives sound like a tragedy,” Webster said. “But the media has not historically managed that.”
Grey-Thompson puts it like this: “There is a point at which you tell someone’s story, but it’s probably not when they’re competing, and it’s not the central point.” One key marker of progress, as with the greater visibility of women’s sport: when people stop being applauded for showing up and start being subjected to critical analysis by pundits. “That’s really important,” she said. “I had a lot of that ‘well done’ when I screwed up when I was competing. But in the end sport is about winning and losing.”
The wider reality for people with disabilities
If Paralympians really had super powers, they might have magicked away the inadequate access to sport that is a problem for so many other disabled people: almost half of those surveyed for a recent report by the Disability Policy Centre said that they lacked suitable facilities for physical activity near where they lived, and more than half said that they had been unable to watch sport because of accessibility problems.
Grey-Thompson’s decision to go public with her frustrations at being forced to drag herself off a train because no staff were available to help her was a considered one, based on the fact that this is a more familiar reality for many people with disabilities than anything that will happen in Paris this week. “Because I used to be an athlete and I’m a parliamentarian, people pick up on it if it happens to me. But it’s generally really hard to get traction about things like that.”
One sign of the persistence of prejudice is the fact that, as well as messages of support and “people saying this has happened to them too, I got a backlash: people asking what am I doing out on a bank holiday Monday, and do I really expect someone to be waiting any time I get the train”.
That chimes with Webster’s bald analysis of the obstacles that are routinely erected in front of disabled people: “It’s good the Paralympics are on telly. But, like … everything is broadly terrible. I don’t mean that being disabled is bad – in fact, being disabled is fun. But nobody wants to talk about all the terrible things about the way we are treated: everyone wants to talk about Sarah Storey winning a million gold medals.
“That’s great, obviously, and what an incredible woman she is. But I bet you when she’s out with her kids, people make comments about whether she can look after them.”
