The return of the brash
What Own the Podium did for Canadians' sense of self, the Paralympics may do for disabled people.
Brashness makes its return, once again in an unexpected place. That attitude is exemplified by an advertisement from the Canadian Paralympic Committee featuring a one-legged athlete: “She doesn't want your sympathy. But her opponents might.” The Paralympics, which begin today in Vancouver, are about elite-level athletics, a celebration of the physical life featuring those not often associated with such a celebration. They are not about sympathy.
Take sledge hockey. This is a contact sport every bit as much as ice hockey is. Players strapped onto aluminum or steel sledges on two blades propel themselves with sharp sticks (at the other end of the sticks is a curved blade to shoot the puck) and bash into one another, body on body, with the take-no-prisoners zeal of a Mark Messier. The puck flies around at up to 100 kilometres an hour. The Swedes invented the game in the early 1960s, but it looks and feels Canadian . No sympathy here.
Good for Canada that Hockey Canada, this country's supreme hockey agency, oversees the sport. A country that supports all its hockey players, whether male or female, disabled or not, has embarked on the road to inclusion. Canada has far to go yet on that road. But it used to be, as skier Lauren Woolstencroft describes it, that disabled athletes had to “wear hand-me-down suits and race on outdated equipment.” And now they train “on snow in the summer and up to 40 days before our World Cup season begins.” Canada is investing in excellence among disabled people, as it should.
The Paralympics are an expression of what disabled people can do. Ms. Woolstencroft, for instance, was born with no legs below the knee and no arm below her left elbow, but she began skiing at age four, and is stunningly versatile, competing in skiing's five events, including downhill and giant slalom. She is also an electrical engineer who helped design electricity infrastructure for the Games' mountain events. Sympathy is for the people who lag behind everyone else.
The profile of the Paralympics is rising, much as disabled people are becoming more visible in mainstream society. “We've felt over the years that Paralympic sport never quite made the sports pages the way it made the human interest pages,” says Carla Qualtrough, president of the Canadian Paralympic Committee. “People were more interested in how somebody lost their arm in the snowblower accident than the fact that they are the fastest person on the planet who skis with one arm.”
But times change. The expectation now is that investing in disabled people will produce success, and excellence. It is the same message that proved so fruitful for Canada last month at the Olympics.
...play hard but have some fun;
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