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Obviously everyone in LOCOG is focused 100 percent on staging the greatest Paralympic Games that the world has seen and there’s thousands of elements in that. But one of the really key prizes, aside from the gold medals, aside from the global TV coverage is – if we nail all of that detail – there really is a phenomenal prize to play for and that is the opportunity that the Games presents to really make a step change in attitudes towards, and opportunities for, disabled people.
Historically hosting the Paralympics has had a positive impact on society
I’ve seen that in a number of Games I’ve been lucky enough to compete in. When we went to South Korea in 1988 for the Seoul Paralympic Games, before we went we sort had a lot of briefings sort of suggesting we should keep quite a low profile while we were there, because there wasn’t really the concept of the disabled person in society out there – they’re a very different place.
But as soon as we arrived you could sense how the essence of the Paralympic Games and the spirit of the athletes and the Games themselves really started to infect that city and ripple out across the country. Just by having one-to-one interactions with retailers, going to restaurants, going into shops you could sense it was making a difference. These guys perhaps had never met a disabled person before but it was just really able to have very ordinary interactions.
I think if you look at that society now you can see changes in employment opportunities, education opportunities and just wider society has opened up for disabled people. A heck of a lot of that can be traced absolutely back to October 1988 when they hosted the Paralympic Games.
I think every nation is on a journey with this in terms of disability rights, in terms of wider equality. For a lot of people in Britain we are a fair way down that journey but it still is very much a journey with a lot still to be achieved.
If you look at education, performance and opportunities for disabled people, if you look at employment statistics and see how many disabled people of working age aren’t currently working they’re extraordinary statistics for any advanced, civilised democracy.
So there’s still a heck of a lot to be achieved and it really is getting into both the push and the pull factors – what society really needs to do, what needs to be put in place to enable disabled people to achieve their potential. And the Paralympic Games really has a key role to play in that. It’s not to overstate the potential of the Games – it can’t, at a stroke, address inequality, disadvantage, discrimination – but I really believe it can have a phenomenally positive profound impact on attitudes to, and opportunities for, disabled people.
What experiences might people have that could change attitudes?
Through the simple fact of perhaps people who have never come to a Paralympic Games before.
People who’ve never seen Paralympic sport, perhaps watching it on Channel Four, perhaps coming to one of the Live Sites and just witnessing sport like never before.
Seeing phenomenal athletic performance: Oscar Pistorius, the ‘Blade Runner’; Seeing David Weir powering his wheelchair by his hands at 32 miles an hour.
Seeing Wheelchair Rugby, a phenomenal sport which probably a lot of people have never witnessed before – such a tough sport, they are smashing into each other with such power they don’t just have a physio on the side of the court, they have a welder on the side of the court. It is a phenomenal sport and that I think can really start to open peoples’ minds to possibilities.
As I say, it’s not a panacea but it is a phenomenally positive element on the journey.
The Paralympics are an opportunity that will hopefully making people feel more comfortable around the subject of disability and how to treat people with a disability
Through people experiencing the sport and that possibility and that potential has got have a positive impact on demystifying, taking away some of those understandable fears and concerns. And the real key is don’t worry about saying the wrong thing because saying nothing at all is absolutely for sure the wrong thing.
Interact, ask people, get involved in the communication, get involved in the dialogue, ask someone if they need a hand – there’s no great shakes about it, get involved because saying nothing, avoiding, it’s a very British thing, I think. It’s completely understandable this sense of not wanting to say the wrong thing, not wanting to have an embarrassment, it’s completely understandable. But the worst thing is to not engage, to not communicate because then you’re not opening up any possibility and that then ripples out in terms of it being a separate world of disability, a separate world of disabled people which people avoid, don’t interact with.
And then it’s not surprising that in terms of educational opportunity, employment opportunities they just don’t arrive because people have not engaged with that.
But in reality it’s not complicated, it’s not difficult, like so much it’s simply about having the confidence to just communicate, just have a chat.
Young people are learning about the Paralympics, becoming comfortable with the subject of disability, broadening their perspective
Some of the greatest stuff we’re lucky enough to do here is all around the education programme. In Singapore we talked about using the Games to inspire change for young people.
And it really is a fantastic privilege and honour to be able to go into schools and chat to the kids about Paralympic Games, Paralympic values, and some of the Paralympians from Great Britain who may well be standing on that medal rostrum later this summer.
I was at Sheendale Primary School a couple of weeks ago and the great thing about the visits is school kids will ask you anything, they don’t have that sense of ‘I better not get involved, there might be an embarrassment if I ask a particular question’, they ask the questions and that is absolutely spot on, it’s brilliant.
By having such a great education programme, by touching so many schools up and down the country, that’s a phenomenal possibility to change attitudes right at that entry level. Primary school kids, reception class, right up to sort of nine, 10 year olds, chatting to them, enabling them to communicate, to interact with a disabled person, ask those questions which are the obvious questions to ask: ‘How do you get around?' 'Why don’t you walk into things?' 'How do you know when the end of the swimming pools coming?’ – all those questions which are absolutely obvious questions to ask , they ask them and hundreds and hundreds more – and quite right too.
We really hope that by having that education programme, by learning about the Paralympic Games, the Paralympic values, meeting Paralympians and some of the guys who’ll be competing this summer, surely that can only have a phenomenally positive impact and really enable them to be thoughtful, understanding and have such a broader perspective than perhaps previous generations might have had the opportunity to have.
