Thursday briefing: Why athletes and activists want to tell a new story about the Paralympics
Good morning. At a spectacular Paralympic Games opening ceremony last night, the head of the International Paralympic Committee, Andrew Parsons, said that “disability is not a flaw in the person: it is the architecture, practices, attitudes, lifestyles and models of society that create the ‘situation’”. But for a lot of television viewers tuning in to the Games, a single word will summarise what they expect to see: “superhuman”.
That word was central to the breakthrough success of Channel 4’s branding at London 2012, when the Games saw record viewing figures and a new focus on funding for disabled sport. In this telling, the Games are a feelgood success story about athletes overcoming their disability – and if athletes like Hannah Cockroft, Sarah Storey and Dave Ellis can bring home medals for Team GB, they may well be viewed in the same way this year.
But it isn’t as simple as that: successful as the Paralympics are, the “superhuman” story does none of the participants, or other people with disabilities, any favours. Today’s newsletter, with the 11-time Paralympic gold medallist and crossbench peer Tanni Grey-Thompson and journalist and disability activist Lucy Webster, is about the efforts to tell a more truthful story – and the more complicated picture that will remain after 11 days of golden glory come to an end. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Public spending | The Home Office has been accused of submitting “woeful” budget figures under successive Conservative ministers – which officials knew understated ballooning asylum costs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that while the department submitted an average £110m budget for asylum each year, the real annual cost was an average of £2.6bn.
Israel-Gaza war | The UN’s food agency, the World Food Programme (WFP), has said it is pausing movement of its staff in Gaza “until further notice” after one of its vehicles was struck by gunfire at an Israeli military checkpoint.
Social media | The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail. The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children.
Society | More 15-year-olds are reporting low life satisfaction in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, prompting claims of a “happiness recession” for British teenagers. The group is at the bottom of European rankings in terms of life satisfaction across 27 nations, analysis by the Children’s Society said.
UK news | A man has been handed a suspended prison sentence after being convicted of throwing what appeared to be a coffee cup at Nigel Farage during the recent general election campaign.
In depth: The problem with treating the Paralympics as ‘inspiration porn’
For most disabled people, Tanni Grey-Thompson’s dismal experience on a train this week, when she had no help to disembark at London’s King’s Cross, will be much more relatable than her huge collection of gold medals. Still, when the Paralympics rolls around, “I find myself wanting to be excited”, Lucy Webster said. “There are loads of disabled people on the telly, and when do you ever see that the rest of the time?”
At the same time, she says, sport broadcasters’ natural predilection for underdog stories risks highlighting a narrative that is totally infuriating for the average disabled person. “It’s a very double-edged sword,” Webster said. “Every time the Games come around, I’m aware that I’m about to hear a lot of uncomfortable and problematic things.” So is anything changing?
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The Paralympics’ impact
As the most culturally visible version of disabled people’s lives that makes its way into the mainstream, there is no doubt that the Paralympics has made a real impact. A lot more people know at least something about the wide variety of disabilities that a person might be living with, and recognise the capacity that a disabled person has for athletic triumph (or disaster).
There is some (albeit limited) evidence of an effect on accessibility in host cities, and the way the Games can create public figures such as Grey-Thompson who can go on to have a wider impact can only be a good thing. Meanwhile, the Games’ coverage demonstrates the wholly unsurprising fact that people with disabilities can present a TV show, and highlights their absence for the other three years and 50 weeks in each cycle. “If they can present the Paralympics, why can’t they present everything else?” Webster asked. “It can feel a bit like: we’ll let disabled people do disabled-people things, but we don’t really want them the rest of the time.”
As important as all of this is, in the end, the idea that sport has a unique power to change the world is a dangerous one. “Someone said to me that 2012 changed disabled people’s lives,” Grey-Thompson said. “Well, it changed some Paralympians’ lives. But we should be careful about expecting it to shift every single thing for disabled people. You don’t expect the Olympics to do anything like that.”
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The legacy of the ‘superhuman’ story
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
What else we’ve been reading
Vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” keep coming back to haunt him. Here are some of the most legendary from history, from Eartha Kitt to SJP, as chosen by Elle Hunt. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters
Women’s football is largely safe, inclusive and representative. But after homophobic abuse was directed at Manchester United’s Geyse Ferreira on social media this week, Júlia Belas Trindade writes for our Moving the Goalposts newsletter (sign up here) on why the game still has work to do to protect its players. Charlie Lindlar, newsletters team
“What a thrill, to know no one understands them like they understand each other”: Adrian Horton has written an ode to Industry’s Eric and Harper, whose twisted mentor/mentee relationship continues to unfurl in HBO’s hit series. Hannah
George Monbiot is urgent as ever in this column on how governments outsource fixing the climate crisis to the private and voluntary sectors. “We tiny warriors flail in the face of the corporate army. We cannot build social consensus without the state. Where is it?” Charlie
The boyzilian is in: Zoe Williams finds out why more and more men are “manscaping” their pubic hair – and enlists the help of her husband as a waxing guinea pig. Hannah
Sport
Football | Newcastle’s Sean Longstaff scored the decisive penalty after it finished 1-1 with Nottingham Forest in the second round of the Carabao Cup. Meanwhile, a controversial deflected goal off Jarrod Bowen (above) in the 88th minute gave West Ham a 1-0 win over Bournemouth.
Tennis | Harriet Dart’s hopes of breaking new ground at the US Open came to a bitter end in oppressive New York heat as she fell 7-6 (10), 6-1 in the second round to the 19th seed Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Novak Djokovic slammed his own “awful” serve but progressed after his opponent Laslo Djere was forced to retire.
Football | Southampton have agreed to sign Aaron Ramsdale from Arsenal in a permanent deal worth about £25m, including add-ons. The goalkeeper will undergo a medical in the next 24 hours.
The front pages
The Guardian’s lead story is “Tories ‘woefully’ understated the cost of asylum, claims thinktank”. “Starmer in Germany – Brexit reset” says the Daily Mirror, while the i has “Starmer must give way on youth migration to get softer Brexit, EU sources claim”. “Farage: not a word from our PM on boats crisis!” – that’s the Daily Express, while the Mail has “Motorists face fuel hike under Starmer’s squeeze”. That’s in the Telegraph as well: “Fuel duty could be next in tax grab”. The Times has “Mass release of inmates ‘rolls the dice’ on crime”. “3 pints and you’re out” – the Metro says Ryanair wants passengers limited to two drinks before flying. “Brussels probe into breach of digital rules adds to pressure on Telegram” is the top story in the Financial Times.
Today in Focus
Black Box: episode 4 – Bing and I
Today in Focus continues to revisit the Black Box series on the dangers and promises of AI. In today’s episode: two stories about the way artificial intelligence could make the world better – and is already doing so.
Cartoon of the day | Nicola Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
For nearly 80 years, Lego’s multicoloured bricks have been used in the construction of any number of wonderful designs. Now, the company is doubling down on plans to use them in the fight to build a better world. The Swedish company is committing to an increased sustainability initiative that will see it derive 50% of the plastics used in its bricks from renewable and recyclable materials, rather than fossil fuels – with the switch complete in its entirety by 2032.
The move is part of Lego’s pledge to triple its spending on sustainability, without passing a penny of the cost on to consumers. “So far we have decided that we will bear the burden of it and [the extra cost] comes out of our bottom line,” says Niels Christiansen, Lego’s chief executive.
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Bored at work?
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