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Just days before Paralympians last gathered for their Winter Games in Beijing, Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine.
One year later Yevhenii Korinets, from Zhytomyr Oblast on the border of Belarus, lost his leg during a bitter fire fight in Minkivka.
Life can come at you faster than a double amputee sprinter on carbon-fibre blades sometimes, with Korinets making his Paralympic debut as a sitting volleyball player this week.
Six years ago, Canadian rower Jacob Wassermann was paralysed from the waist down in a bus crash that claimed the lives of 16 of his junior ice hockey teammates. Australian table tennis hope Ma Lin was just five years old when his right arm was eaten by a brown bear during a family trip to a zoo in China.
And then there is Ibrahim Hamadtou, a double arm amputee who plays table tennis with the bat in his mouth, and Iran’s sitting volleyball star Morteza Mehrzad, at eight foot the world’s second tallest man, whose right leg is 15 centimetres shorter than his left.
There are 4,000 similar tales at these Games, though it would be too easy, too trite to turn coverage into saccharine and cliched human interest stories of triumph, adversity and a life without limits.
But these athletes – with perhaps just a handful of exceptions – are not household names, context is valuable, even if not a single one would allow you to define them by their disability.
The Paralympics – the vision of a German-British neurologist who escaped his country in 1939 – is a sports story not a sob story. For some they are the Games of second chances but for all they are no second rate alternative to the five-ringed circus that served as their warm-up act. No-one is plucky or bold, no medals are awarded for just turning up and trying hard.
With the record £68m investment of crucial National Lottery funding in this British team, success is measured by the simple metric of gold, silver and bronze.
This opening was held on the Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette met her fate at the guillotine. If you tell Hannah Cockroft she’s courageous, she’d take your head clean off. Call fencer Piers Gilliver brave and you may just find yourself impaled on the sharp end of his epée.
Not a single one of the 100 plus medals Great Britain are predicted to win here by UK Sport will be achieved by overcoming anything other than the opposition.
Teddy Riner is about as popular a sportsperson as you can find in France, winning a fifth career judo gold and lighting the flame at the Olympics.
But he found himself on the end of a verbal ippon from French Paralympian Sofyane Mehiaoui after describing athletes at these Games as “superheroes”. Don’t mess with Teddy, proclaimed L’Équipe after his Olympic heroics. Mehiaou wasn’t listening.
“We are people with disabilities and we want to be considered normal people,” he said. “We are not superheroes, we are athletes. So, come see us because we are going to perform, we are going to achieve sporting exploits, that’s why you have to come and see us.”
Words – even if well-intentioned – matter and perhaps the greatest legacy of the Paralympics remains shifting still stubborn prejudices about disability.
“Paralympians are also here to achieve something far greater than personal glory,” said International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons, before French president Emmanuel Macron declared the Games open.
“They want equality and inclusion for themselves and for the world’s 1.3 billion persons with disabilities. Through their performances Paralympic athletes will challenge stigma, alter attitudes, and redefine the limits of what you think is possible,” he said.
The problem is these two weeks can be too quickly be forgotten, especially by politicians – from more than just one nation – who laud their athletes’ achievements one day and then cut their allowances the next.
According to the International Paralympic Committee, people with disabilities make up about 15 per cent of the global population, the largest marginalised group in the world. It is also – according to the World Report on Disability – a number that is sadly increasing.
As ever with these opening ceremonies there was the weird – a DJ in an ill-fitting dressing gown, an interpretive version of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” that should be instantly regretted – and the wonderful, including a joyous parade of nations on a perfect summer’s evening. Olympics 0 Paralympics 1.
Just as they did a few short weeks ago, albeit under stygian skies and biblical rain, the Parisian landmarks did the heavy lifting for their opening night show, the Eiffel Tower glittering gold against the dark night sky.
The Champs-Élysées was the catwalk for over 4,000 athletes from 168 teams, their parade framed by the Arc de Triomphe, adorned with the Paralympic Agitos symbol under a blood red setting sun.
After a journey that started four days ago in Stoke Mandeville, this movement’s leafy home counties version of Olympia, the flame burns over Paris once more, rising above the Jardin Du Tuileries in that now iconic hotair balloon as Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” played.
After a brief respite and recharge, the sport can finally start again, just don’t call anyone brave.
Aldi are proud Official Partners of Team GB & ParalympicsGB, supporting all athletes through to Paris 2024.
