Comments

The other Greatest Show on Earth

Inside Sport, June 2004

Sydney 2000. One of our most popular track-and-field stars (a living legend at age 27) lit the flame, then went on to win gold. In the pool, our undoubted star was an amiable 17-year-old who swam fast and interviewed well. Our women's basketball team made the gold-medal game, but lost to unbeatable opponents. Meanwhile, would-be gold-medallists fell foul of the rules and were disqualified. In the end, Australia had its best-ever medals tally, and the Games president announced that the Sydney Games were the "best ever".

            If you think that sounds like the Olympics... well OK, you'd be right. But fortunately for this article, it also describes the Paralympics.

            Remember them? Still buoyed by Olympic spirit, Aussies returned to Homebush in droves, resulting in record crowds. The television coverage broke ratings records for the ABC, as the home team (which easily topped the medal tally) became our latest national heroes.

            Now what? For the Paralympic champions, fame has been fleeting. Australia's Paralympian of the Year, teen swimmer Siobhan Paton, won't be defending any of her six gold medals in Athens because of - are you sitting down? - apaperwork error. (More about that later.) Everyone remembers the scam by Spain's "intellectually disabled" basketball team, most of whom had no disability apart from moral depravity. Otherwise, it's all a blur. Even after 44 years, the Paralympics still don't get the respect due to that one of the world's largest and most prestigious sporting events.

            So what can the officials do about it? Well, we're no experts, but here are some ideas...

1. Show that these people are real champions

The Paralympics have a reputation as the "disabled Olympics". Fair enough, but this leads to the commonly held belief that Paralympians are not the world's best (unlike Olympians), and they are all on medication, making drug testing a joke.

            In fact, the Games do showcase the world's best (albeit within their disability classes), and of the 4,000 Paralympic athletes in Sydney, only 14 were allowed to take medication. (Result: 11 drug disqualifications.)

            Obviously, they aren't usually as strong or fast as their Olympic counterparts. Paton's winning 200m freestyle time of 2:14.90 in Sydney (a world record) was a good 16 seconds slower than Susie O'Neill's (not a world record). But that didn't make her any less tough. If the Paralympics were ever just a worthy event for "unfortunate" people, the elite competitors of the past 20 years have changed all that. This is serious business!

2. Celebrate your stars

Pop quiz: name an Aussie Paralympian. Siobhan Paton? No, that's cheating - she was in the last paragraph. How about alpine skier Michael Milton, the one-legged daredevil who was last year's Laureus Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability? Rings a bell? OK, you presumably know about Louise Sauvage. According to surveys, the wheelchair-racer is one of Australia's most recognised sportswomen - and all she needed was a 16-year career, seven gold medals, and one of the most impressive CVs in Australian track-and-field history.

            During the Sydney Games, Paralympics officials tried to turn some of the other athletes into celebrities. Take Lisa Llorens. The Canberra athlete idolised Melinda Gainsford-Taylor - until she found that cheetahs run faster. She asked her coach whether she could change role models (just as other athletes might ask permission to change sponsors), and appeared on a Paralympics calendar, painted as a cheetah by bodypainting artist Emma Hack. "I realise the cheetah was built for speed," said Llorens, "so I decided I am a cheetah, a gold, shiny cheetah."

            Her scheme obviously worked. In Sydney, she won three gold medals: the 100 metres, the high jump and the long jump, in which she broke her own world record three times. During the Games, Australians loved her: the brilliant, versatile, slightly kooky super-athlete who (here's the twist) suffers from autism. This meant that breaking records was slightly easier than dealing with crowds. Here was the sort of character you just don't find in the Olympics.

            Three months later, the IPC banned her from competition - for something which, quite clearly, was not her fault.

            Which brings us to our next suggestion...

3. Treat them nicely

Why can't Paralympians be respected like Olympians? At the height of the Paralympics, the media tried to stir interest with comparisons to Olympic stars. Llorens became "the Marion Jones of the Paralympics"; Troy Sachs was "the Michael Jordon of wheelchair basketball"; Paton was "the Paralympic Thorpedo".

            Fine, but look at how the real Thorpedo is treated. The officials have bent the rules just so he can race his favourite event in the Olympics. He messed up his trials, but why should that stop him? If you're the best, you compete, right?

            Tell that to the Paralympic Thorpedo. After the Spanish basketball scandal, the International Paralympic Committee panicked, banning all intellectually disabled (ID) Paralympians from competition, including Llorens and Paton. It was a bit like banning all athletes for the sins of Ben Johnson.

            After years of wrangling between the IPC and INAS-FID (the world governing body for ID athletes), ID events will be held to Athens merely as "demonstration" sports.

            So will Our Siobhan still be there? Er, no. In a bureaucratic piece de resistance, completed nomination forms had been left on a desk at INAS-FID... and forgotten. With a lack of eligible nominations, the ID swimming events were cancelled.

            Again, the athletes can do nothing. Thanks to bureaucratic bungling, they lose. Would we let Thorpey put up with that? Of course not. But Paralympians, even the favourites, are expected to grin and bear it.

4. Remember: sporting fame starts with images

Emma Hack was on to a good thing with her calendar. So good that, two years later, the Americans pinched the idea. For a US-wide advertising campaign, their Paralympic swimmers were painted as a school of barracuda, and -- in what seems like real idea-pinching -- amputee sprinter Marion Shirley became a cheetah. (Llorens recently retired, leaving only one cheetah in the Paralympic Village.)

            As expected, the Yanks will try a few tricks to get noticed. Another amputee sprinter, April Holmes, even featured in the video for Shaggy's "Strength of a Woman". OK, so it's no Hollywood blockbuster, but it's brought her closer than most of her teammates to bona fide celebrity status.

5. Turn the negatives into positives

After four years, the IPC is still dawdling on the ID problem, punishing innocent athletes for the sins of a few. Scandal is not something they handle well, and they are still trying to sweep it under the carpet.

            But twisted as this might sound, perhaps this shameful affair should be a source of pride. Proof that the Paralympics are so important that people are willing to cheat, and something to get the Games out of the inspirational-but-dull ghetto. "People are always saying how inspirational we are," said US Paralympic ski champ Chris Devlin-Young back in 2002. "Maybe a scandal would help put us over the hump."

            Athletes with flaws, not just disabilities? Amazing. Sounds like a real sporting event!