Don’t underestimate the power of the Paralympics

I like the French. I like their food, I like their climate, particularly further south, and, at the risk of pushing a thin line that bumps into clichéd national characteristics, I like their attitude. You’ve got to hand it to the French – whatever happens, they’ll be French about it. In the teeth of any storm, as any crisis builds, or anything that is being said, they’ll shrug and move on in their own inexorable way. Or park a load of tractors to prevent access to a major city.

The Paris Olympics closing ceremony saw them build things around the performance of Phoenix, a band with limited international appeal, who peaked over a decade ago and who have songs that are not bothered by the idea of an anthem. Not French enough? How about the addition of Phoenix’s more successful contemporaries Air, performing Playground Love, a muted piece of polite jazz electronica that was written for The Virgin Suicides, a physiologically damaging film about sisters living in an overly protected manner away from society, and their deaths.

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Want a bit more? Top it with a big torch-song version of My Way. Take that, shiny LA 2028!

Aside from the ending being gloriously contrary, a recurring motif at that closing event was that things weren’t over yet, that it was just a pause until the Paralympics could begin at the end of August. Which are very nice words, but the reality is that the Paralympics play second fiddle. The competitors are less well known and less fêted, the venue attendance numbers are smaller and TV viewing is way down.

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Which is the wrong way round. It is a remarkable event with unique sports, frequently at a whole other level. Watch wheelchair rugby once and you’ll be hooked. It wasn’t called murderball in its early days because it’s for the fainthearted.

And some of the stories around it are going to be incredible and knockout emotional. Take, for instance, Ed Jackson, one of the Paralympic coverage hosts. A very successful professional rugby player, he suffered a catastrophic spinal injury seven years ago and thought he’d never move from the neck down again. He’s now climbing mountains in a series of charity fundraisers.

Interviewed in next week’s Big Issue, he is, he says, still obviously living with the day-to-day challenges brought by spinal injury. But he is finding ways to be happy in the moment and in the small successes of the mundane. Not to be patronising, but it is humbling.

We all, at some level, deal with our own personal traumas, and we all have to find a coping mechanism that works. Stories like Ed Jackson’s allow us to really pause and take stock. There will be many glorious examples of knock-your-socks-off achievements, of returns from places that most people will never have to go. In a summer of difficulty, it’s worth celebrating the best of us.

Also, there’s an easy way to make sure the Paralympics isn’t marginalised in the wake of the Olympics. Hold both at the same time. The much-maligned Commonwealth Games may have its critics, but it does plan to host a para games as a part of it. This idea might take a few organisational tweaks, but I greet such challenges with a Gallic shrug.

Allez!

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on Twitter.

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