Ignore the cynics. A huge number of us loved the Rio Olympics, and before that loved the London Olympics, and are proud of how many gold medals Team GB managed to win. But I was much prouder of what this country did in 2012 during the last Paralympics when, building on Beijing, London finally and properly brought disabled people into the inner circle of popular elite sport. 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, with the same branding, vivid ballyhoo and saturation media coverage. There was virtually no sense of “second best”. The Royal Mail, albeit under some political pressure, produced individual stamps to celebrate Paralympic champions and painted postboxes gold in their home towns. There was a massive poster and broadcast advertising campaign, and Channel 4 deserves a shout-out for its promotional film, We’re the Superhumans. More than 4,200 athletes from 164 nations took part, an all-time record, and demand was such that extra tickets had to be distributed. Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympics Committee, declared the event “the greatest Paralympic Games ever”. Part of this derived from the Olympic Games, which were themselves such a success. We had become accustomed the long, hot days of watching sport, and the Paralympics benefited. But for whatever reason, we all got behind disability in sport, and recognised that a man in a wheelchair or a swimmer lacking a full hand could be as heroic as any “normal” competitor. 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. By mid August, only 12% of tickets had been sold. Craven says the Paralympics has not faced such circumstances in its 56-year history. It’s by no means all the fault of Brazil, whose government, badly strapped for cash, is doing its best to save the Paralympic Games. But it does show how incredibly difficult it can be to keep momentum going for disabled athletes, and disability issues generally. Let’s move closer to home. There has been endless talk about the legacy of 2012 – have we really become fitter and sportier people as a result of watching all that sport? Has east London really benefited as well as it could have done from the Games? But what about the legacy of the London Paralympics? Since then we have had four hard years of austerity economics in this country, and no group has been as badly affected as disabled people: about half a million people have been hit. 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. The government’s own figures ahead of the last budget suggested that cuts to disabled people would “save” taxpayers £4.4bn. How? Well, among other things there is a £40 cut coming next March for many new claimants of employment support allowance (ESA), around a third of the value of this crucial benefit. That equates to people not being able to cope, to having to rely on food banks, and occasionally to people killing themselves in despair. A third of those surveyed by the disability benefits consortium said they already had trouble feeding themselves, at the current ESA rate. 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, on the other. Between sentimentality and venom, all that is missing is a clearsighted view of the vast majority of ordinary disabled people doing their decent best to get along, work, and live tolerable lives. But the binary heroes/scroungers, love ’em/loathe ’em mindset seems to be our woeful Paralympic legacy. According to data uncovered last year through the Freedom of Information Act, hate crimes against disabled people reported to the police during 2014-15 rose by 41%. The disability hate crimes network regards this as only the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and believes there are 60,000 such incidents a year. All statistics should be regarded with caution but there is too much evidence on display of our shameful treatment of disabled people – from Treasury officials making “easy” cuts, to newspapers slandering the unwell as scroungers – to be ignored. Frankly, that golden glow from the summer of 2012 has been betrayed, not just in Rio but every day on the streets of Britain. Meet the superhumans? Perhaps we should start to introduce ourselves to a few of them.
Rio has dismantled many Olympic venues, cut transport services and is currently questioning grant possibilities to disabled athletes from 40 of the world’s poorest countries in the run up to the Paralympics, damaging the legacy created by Beijing 2012.