We remind you that we are talking about contests for people with disabilities. It’s even a little embarrassing for IPC, but on the other hand, it doesn’t hurt much. What else can you expect from these brilliant people? We are already used to it. We can simply state that, compared to them, our Paralympic athletes are people with unlimited capabilities.
It is true that with a cool head some very unpleasant questions begin to arise, directed, unfortunately, at ourselves, the people.
I’ll try to explain it. Have you noticed how, following the IOC, its “big brother”, the IPC has been based on a certain model of behavior? Instead of Coubertin’s romantic formula “faster, higher, stronger”, the main driving force of the Olympic and, later, Paralympic movement, was the business model of the most primitive scheme, well known to the miserable world of national show business. : “We put on a show for you: you give the money.” But if in big sports, although not in all types, but only in “commercially intensive” ones, this model somehow worked, then in Paralympic competitions the standards of show business turn broadcasts into what is commonly called “Spanish shame.”
There, the cameras seem to be forced to focus on exposed stumps, spasms and convulsions of athletes with the corresponding diagnoses, on black bandages and thus, as it is fashionable to say, “objectify” the suffering of others. And somehow, very quickly, the noblest event intentionally begins to evoke mixed feelings.
In reality, the big Olympics are slowly becoming roughly the same “Spanish shame,” with athletes visibly having changes in their genome due to advanced pharmacological practices and transgender people replacing them. But during the broadcasts of the Paralympic Games all this becomes so prominent that it is sometimes painful to watch.
It is stupid and obscene to deny the very need for sports and Paralympic competitions for people with disabilities. But today it is even more obscene to participate, even as a spectator, in such a “spectacle.” The feeling of a dead end and the need to change something to remain human does not leave us. It is absolutely impossible to leave everything in the previous, rather obscene, showbiz mode, regardless of the decision of the IPC conference in Bahrain.
