In her recent article for the Guardian, Jackie Ashley claims that the “golden glow from the summer of 2012 has been betrayed, not just in Rio but every day on the streets of Britain.”
“In the summer of 2012, 2.7m tickets were sold, a record for Paralympic sport. Stadiums were packed. Heroes were celebrated. There seemed to be only a barely perceptible gap between the Olympic Games and the London Paralympics. Now, in Rio, there’s a real danger of it being back to business as usual. Extra funding for the Olympics was diverted away from the Rio Paralympics.”
Olympic venues were closed and dismantled. Transport services were cut. Worst of all, a question mark has been thrown over grants enabling disabled athletes from 40 of the world’s poorest countries to come to Rio.”
“It’s by no means all the fault of Brazil, but it does show how incredibly difficult it can be to keep momentum going for disabled athletes, and disability issues generally.”
Closer to home, “in 2014, the Conservative welfare minister, Lord Freud, announced that some disabled people were not worth the minimum wage, and could be paid as little as £2 an hour. The replacement of disability living allowance has caused mayhem for many of our most vulnerable people. Ministers backed down in March on the restrictions they had planned to personal independence payments (PIP), but there are a host of other reductions.
“In a developed society, this can happen only where there is already an ingrained lack of compassion for those with disabilities. Disability campaigners are quite right that in one sense the Paralympic Games sets up a dangerous polarity between the “superhuman” heroes on the one hand, and the “feckless, contemptible scroungers”, as portrayed by the tabloids. Meet the superhumans? Perhaps we should start to introduce ourselves to a few of them.”
What do you think of the 2012 Paralympic legacy? Do you think the scaling back of this years Rio Paralympics is fair? Or does it reflect a general belief in society that funding for disabled focused projects can be cut without repercussion? Let us know in the comments below, on our Facebook page or over on our Twitter.
