The Paris Paralympics are nearly here and, apart from London, it will be the first Games in Europe for 20 years. I am looking forward to it. I’m also intrigued because I believe these Games will provide an important gauge of where the Paralympic movement is at, testing the awareness of disability sport and of disability issues in general.
I still think London 2012 was a bit of an anomaly because of what Seb Coe did with LoCog and Channel 4 with the broadcasting. There was a lot of clever advertising around it, using the fact that we in the UK love a touch of cheeky humour. It pushed at taboos, asking: what can we say about disability? Do we have to tiptoe around it? And it allowed disabled people to have a voice, to relay our point of view. One of the perspectives people had never really grasped before was the fact that, as disabled people, we take the piss out of each other. We gave C4 the permission to go with that. I think this approach elevated the Paralympics in London and we haven’t really had a chance to test the acceptance of disability sport or its popularity in Europe since then.
