I had never had much of
an interest in the Paralympics before this year. Then we watched the
inspirational play about Dr Guttmann who started the whole thing in
the 1940s. This, coupled with the post-Olympic feelgood factor and
the wall to wall TV coverage, meant they could no longer be ignored.
It has been great.
When I started working
with disabled people over 30 years ago [at Stoke Mandeville] I met a
lot of young, highly motivated people with disabilities. Disability
sport was just not on their radar. It might as well not have existed.
Opportunities outside of Stoke were non-existant. How things have
changed.
Too often we consider
it a given that “things were better in the past”. In terms of
opportunities for disabled people that is simply not true.
The paralympics are a
wonderful, bizarre, illogical creation that have somehow made it onto
the biggest of world stages. It is an unlikely story – all you can
do is be glad it happened.
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