Sport Aid

Call me a meanie, call me disability-phob, but can some one please tell me what the Paralympics are all about?

Personally I am not opposed to people with disabilities competing against one another, but on such a scale as the Paralympics for me does not justify the financial cost when money could be spent improving the lives of disabled persons in other Countries where they have fewer opportunities and less facilities or acceptance.

I am one step away from being registered disabled myself [and will probably be a step closer should any one in a wheel chair ever come across me] but I really do not understand why we have an Olympics for the disabled when what we should be doing is encouraging those who can to compete against able bodied folk; after all, isn’t that what we encourage in everyday life, give or take one or two understandable alterations such as adapted toilets and access etc.

I cannot bring myself to watch the spectacle in the way that I did the Olympic Games that preceded them.
I see nothing wrong with someone shooting a gun or even an arrow from a bow whilst seated in a wheel chair if they were to compete in the modern Olympics, which are supposed to portray all that is good about the human race.

To hold these games up as an example of what can be achieved by someone with a disability is not a good way to portray how we should treat someone with a disability, they are not separate, special or different to any of us as we too could find ourselves in their position one day, but to place them in an arena that does more to highlight the fact that some one has lost an arm or a leg rather then what they can achieve does nothing for me as a spectator or to further the cause of accepting disability into society.

Sure, for health and safety reasons start the wheelchair racers off on a separate start line in the Marathon as they do in London, but to single out disability as reason enough to warrant a separate race is surely racism of some form or another. Why not have a separate starting line for Men and Women? Oh, they do? Is that not sexism?