ParalympicsGB are my team of the year – they succeeded where others failed and all without the fanfare they deserved, says Ed Warner.
Sports award season is upon us. This of the Year and That of the Year, on red carpets and across multiple platforms with misty eyes and banging showreels.
Not a vintage year for British sport, though. Too few Olympic champions and national teams that flopped, stuttered or came up agonisingly short. Time, then, to stretch the public’s consciousness beyond the obvious.
I have had cause to reflect in depth on Paralympic sport recently, and in particular its perennial struggle to cut through in a media world dominated by the major sports, especially football.
Look back at Paris 2024, only four or five months ago, and what do you remember? Britons Alex Yee, Keely Hodgkinson and Tom Pidcock perhaps? Or the waves created by international stars such as Simone Biles, Leon Marchand and Mondo Duplantis?
Maybe the gender controversy in the female boxing, Raygun’s kangaroo breakdance, or simply the cauldron held aloft by balloon?
But what of the Paralympics? Britain once again finished second in the medal table, this time with an increased gold medal count, behind only China and ahead of the next hosts, the USA.
Easy to become blasé about such success. Remember, though, that TeamGB dropped from fourth to seventh in the corresponding Olympic table, undermined by a shortage of gold medals.
The problem for us proponents of disability sport is that these Paralympics have apparently created few if any new household names.
Sarah Storey and Hannah Cockroft delivered again. Their names may trigger public recognition, as might the tennis double of Alfie Hewitt and Gordon Reid.
But in all 50 athletes contributed to ParalympicsGB’s 49 gold medals, led by Games debutant Poppy Maskill who won three in the pool (plus a couple of silvers too). What of all their profiles?
For most of the public, I warrant, this summer’s Paralympics are now a warm fuzzy memory of a broad sweep of extraordinary sporting achievements that will continue to fade until Los Angeles 2028 hits Channel 4.
Only twice since Paris has disability sport made news, and both times for the wrong reasons.
First, Channel 4 wrung its hands again about its previous use of “superhuman” to describe Para athletes in promotional material. Then there came the furore about the apparent snub to Britain’s Paralympians who weren’t invited to an afterparty with the nation’s Olympians following a reception for both hosted by the King at Buckingham Palace.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the party saga, it is a reminder if we ever needed one that athletes are the most important players in the sporting movement and that their voice will always hold most sway in the media.
More importantly, the absent invites highlighted the deep sense of injustice felt by many Para athletes in their constant struggle to achieve parity of treatment and opportunity. This is as true of public funding as it is of commercial sponsorship.
There are many barriers to progress on the equality front and the debate about the superhumans strap-line encapsulates a critical one.
The disability sports movement too often looks inward and diverts its energy into debate about microcosmic issues at the expense of collective campaigning.
“Superhumans” was of its time. Bank its positives, learn from any negatives, focus on the now. And remember, the vast majority are unaware of and uninterested in the detail.
The real battle is to engage the public in issues of inclusion in society and the role disability sport, with the Paralympics at the centre, has to play in addressing them.
You know you have a problem when a politician who should know better refers to the Parallelolympics in a speech rather than the Paralympics. Not once but twice.
Paralympians worldwide get to put the letters PLY after their name, just as Olympians can use OLY. These are signifiers that bind athletes together forever and marks them out from the rest of us who have not won the right to represent our country at a Games.
Stronger together, those who have earned a PLY need our backing to build greater awareness of disability sport – and by extension the challenges of disability itself – in the long stretches between Paralympics, winter and summer.
There are those who argue that Britain should follow the US lead and merge TeamGB and ParalympicsGB into one organisation. I’m not of that persuasion.
While there might be operational cost savings, there would be a very real risk that Para athletes would endure an institutionalised second-class status.
Better to embrace collaboration but maintain a distinct identity with an ambition to secure a far greater share of government and business backing in the lead-up to every Games.
As I look across the performance of various British teams – both international and club – in 2024, I can’t see any to match that of the GB collective at the Paris Paralympics.
England’s cricketers have blown hot and cold, the home nations’ male rugby teams have largely had a year to forget, the Americas Cup remains in Kiwi hands, football’s still not come home, and as for Manchester City…
So, my Team of the Year is indisputably ParalympicsGB. Stronger together.
Is there anybody out there?
First, world No1 Jannik Sinner, then world No1 Iga Swiatek. A dispirited reader expresses bemusement at a prize money forfeit and a one-month ban respectively for the two tennis stars’ positive tests for banned substances.
It prompts me to wonder who if anyone is holding the anti-doping torch aloft these days? I’ll return to this subject in the coming weeks.
With knobs on
It’s a way off, but I can definitely see myself taking time out to attend the new World Athletics Ultimate Championships in Budapest in 2026.
Strange name though. Does the international federation want us to rank this 360-athlete event above its established, biannual nine-day World Championships for 2000+ athletes?
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com