Over a dozen days, the task for Paris is clear: drive fresh momentum behind a movement that, most critics agree, has not moved anywhere near quickly enough in the past dozen years.
The Paralympic Games of London 2012 were, by just about every metric and feeling going, the most successful of all-time, but the idea that they might permanently transform the perception and profile of disability sport around the world has been disproved by the fact they remain unrivalled almost three full cycles on.
“It’s kind of embarrassing saying that an event that happened 12 years ago was the best one ever,” said British wheelchair racing star Hannah Cockroft this year.
In Rio, the Games felt an afterthought, made so by budget cuts forced by Olympic overspend and poor ticket sales in the build-up. In Tokyo, too, there was a sense of disconnect between the Paralympics and their Olympic predecessor, that the two halves did not quite belong to the same whole.
The Covid pandemic was largely to blame, with local resistance hardening after a spike in cases during the Olympics, but there was also a shift in the geopolitical landscape after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan occurred in the gap between the two Games, and with immediate implications for sport.
Taekwondo player Zakia Khudadadi, the country’s sole female athlete, was scrambled out of Kabul to compete and has never returned home. She will be in Paris, only now representing a Refugee Team.
This time around, the Paralympics appear set to be a continuation of the same summer’s tale. Given the success of the Olympics, that must be broadly a good thing, though it stands for both better and for worse.
The story of Ukraine’s Paralympians — fifth in the medal table in Tokyo before Russia’s war began — will, like their Olympic counterparts, be one of defiance and inspiration; sporting life ploughing on, despite towns under siege and training facilities destroyed.
Controversy will also wear a familiar cloak: there is triathlon swimming again slated for the Seine, while the debate over inclusion and the protection of women’s sport will rear its head again when Italian sprinter Valentina Petrillo becomes the first openly transgender athlete at the Games.
Above all, though, the expectation is that the magic will live on, with Paris out to show that, in International Paralympic Committee chief Andrew Parsons’ words, “the party is not over”.
Ticket sales yesterday ticked above two million, with Parisians returning to the city from summer breaks having defied expectations of indifference to the Olympics by proving such enthusiastic hosts.
Many of the same venues are again enlisted to enchant, including the Grand Palais, Chateau du Versailles and Eiffel Tower, where the beach volleyball court has been transformed to host blind football. The Stade de France, where Cockroft, Thomas Young, Jonnie Peacock and Sammi Kinghorn will go for athletics gold, could see the biggest crowd for a para-sport event since London 2012.
One criticism of London’s 2012 legacy was that while it made stars of para-athletes, it did little to change the day-to-day lives of the 16 million people living with disabilities in the UK. Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson’s experience of having to crawl off a train at King’s Cross on Monday marked a grim and timely confluence of those themes.
Paris can raise the bar once more.
