Following on from my review of the Olympics earlier this summer, we’ve just had even more spectacular sporting action with the Paralympics in Paris, which I’ve been absolutely obsessed with over the past fortnight.
ParalympicsGB did extremely well as per usual, scooping up 49 golds amongst their 124 medals, and it’s their many achievements I’ll be focusing on in this post of course. But it was great to watch elite athletes from all nations – of which there were 4,400 competitors from 168 delegations in total – as they shared their fascinating stories and showcased their incredible skills in 22 sports, featuring hundreds of events across a myriad of disability categories.
There were huge audiences supporting them with enormous enthusiasm as well, which was wonderful to see. They generated such an electric atmosphere, in stark contrast to the lack of crowds in Tokyo’s Covid-hit Games, so these have really felt like the first proper Paralympics in 8 years.
And it’s also great that the Games were more widely broadcast around the world than ever before, including on Channel 4. Indeed, the fact that there was barely any time difference with the UK made it possible for us Brits to watch everything live on TV and online, and to have full roundups at the end of each day with the highlights programmes and The Last Leg. So it almost felt like a home Games again, the closest we’ve had since London 2012.
All of which meant there was a lot going on all day every day, which was daunting yet exciting to try and keep up with. So in this extensive review post – which isn’t sponsored by anyone and all opinions are my own – I’ll go through all of Britain’s medal winners along with some of my other highlights, and I’ve also made a Youtube playlist to go with it as well. I hope you enjoy!
What a glorious summer of sport this is proving to be. I don’t usually watch or write about a lot of sport, but the Olympics and Paralympics are one of those things I make an exception for, because they’re such massive and special events that I get sucked into very easily.
After the very quiet and stripped back events that had to be held in Tokyo in 2021, the first post-pandemic Olympics in Paris brought back the traditional atmosphere of excitement and drama that everyone loves about the Games, as we watched lots of incredible feats of speed, strength, coordination and agility in a wide variety of sports. It made such an enormous difference having the crowds back again to cheer on the athletes, for whom there was gender parity for the first time, with 5,250 men and 5,250 women competing. It’s not yet equal for the Paralympians though, so there’s still work to do there, and I’ll also be posting a review of those Games next month of course.
Once again Team GB have done very well, with a similar number of total medals to the last few Games. Not as many golds, sure, but some of the silver results have been very close indeed. The competition has certainly been stronger this year, and indeed there have been some notable stars from other nations who caught my attention as well.
So here I’m going to review a lot of my favourite highlights from the last couple of weeks, mainly related to the British team but with a few other people mixed in. I’m not affiliated with anyone involved, it’s just nice to relive the memories, and I hope you enjoy looking through it all too!
Soon after the sensational Olympics in 2012, which I’ve recently posted about extensively to mark the 10th anniversary, we then got to enjoy another couple of weeks of multi-sporting excellence courtesy of the Paralympics. Having disabled people take centre stage in these Games, for the whole world to see their stunning achievements, is always incredibly important and thrilling to watch. The Opening Ceremony took place exactly 10 years ago today as I’m publishing this, on 29 August 2012.
The Paralympics cannot change all of society’s attitudes and behaviours overnight of course, nor does it claim to do so. It clearly doesn’t represent every disabled person or impairment, nor the myriad of different ways we each go about our lives. These are exceptional athletes who have pushed themselves to their absolute limits, so their lives are very different to the rest of us in many ways. But even so, they are still people with conditions and experiences that many of us can relate to, and their exposure on a global stage undeniably helps to raise awareness, challenge misconceptions, and encourage greater acceptance and inclusion, in an engaging and entertaining way. It isn’t a quick fix for equality and inclusivity, and it’s totally understandable that some disabled people take issue with the way it’s promoted – there is a lot of work to be done beyond the Paralympic bubble for sure. But it is a very prominent springboard in the right direction, and I for one love watching it.
The London 2012 Paralympics were the biggest Games to date, and they certainly made their mark, by successfully extending and surfing on the tidal wave of intense enthusiasm that had been generated by the Olympics. They sold record numbers of tickets and attracted a huge TV audience, as people flocked to watch and support the biggest number of disabled competitors to date, many of whom were or became lasting household names.
So in this post I’m going to look back at some of my favourite moments of the 2012 Paralympics, with the aid of Channel 4’s Blu-ray set of the Games. There isn’t as much to talk about as there was for the Olympics, so I can go through it in just one post this time, but there are still lots of great highlights worth mentioning along the way. And I’ve also created a Paralympics playlist on Youtube with plenty of clips too. So I hope you enjoy!
They said it wouldn’t work, that it was a waste of money. It would be dull and nobody would care, so we’d all forget about it once it was over. Or we’d be the subject of everlasting international ridicule.
That was the reaction of many when it was announced in 2005 that London had won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. There was still rightful jubilation amongst the organisers, athletes and many sports fans of course, and I was very much looking forward to it personally as well. But a lot of people had serious concerns and complaints about everything from the cost (although it apparently ended up being under budget) to the logo. And there were the usual subset of people, online and elsewhere, who were keen for everyone else to know that they weren’t interested – i.e. if they didn’t like it, they didn’t think anyone else should either. They were adamant it would be a pointless disaster, with several journalists and news publications adding fuel to that fire of negativity as well.
How very wrong all the doubters were.
That summer of sporting excellence – topped and tailed by spectacular opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and all covered extensively by the BBC and Channel 4 respectively – blew the vast majority of people away, leaving the few remaining closed-minded grumpy people to languish in a lonely wilderness. It was beyond anything that had been expected, even those of us who were keen to see it, and genuinely made you feel proud to be British. It had its teething troubles and controversies before launch, without a doubt, like any project on such a huge scale. But once it got underway, we showed the world what we were capable of at our very best.
Ten years on, those wonderful memories haven’t faded, and are being celebrated, with special events in the Olympic Park including the lighting of a legacy flame and a special exhibition. I haven’t been to see the exhibition yet, but I have had a little wander around some of the Olympic Park, and will continue exploring further over the weeks ahead, as it has been a while since I last visited, and there’s still a lot of I haven’t seen. Keep an eye on my Instagram for some photos in the coming days and weeks, as well as the few examples I’m including in these blog posts when relevant. Don’t forget you can also look back at my charity abseil down the Arcelormittal Orbit Tower in the park as well!
The important thing here is that the Games themselves were a huge success, which we can all agree on. So to mark the big anniversary, this is the first in a series of posts where I’ll be revisiting my personal highlights of the 2012 Olympics & Paralympics.
And to start with, I’m going to extensively review the Olympics Opening Ceremony that kicked it all off on 27 July 2012, mainly focusing on the coverage on the BBC’s Blu-ray box set and the music on the Isles Of Wonder soundtrack album, but also mentioning other content from a playlist I’ve compiled of highlights, behind the scenes footage and other music from the ceremony. So I hope you enjoy this epic post about an epic event!
If you’ve seen my School Days video, you’ll know I used to be a member of a local sports club for disabled people when I was a kid. So, as well as doing sports at school, I would also take part in lots of swimming galas around England, from Darlington in the north, to Plymouth in the south, and lots of other places in between.
There were people with lots of different disabilities at those events, so to try and make things as equal as possible, they would either try and group people with similar conditions together in each event, or the competitors in each race would start at different times (from slowest first, to fastest last), based on their personal best times. The theory being that the finish of each race would be quite close, although often that never really held true.
In any case, I won a lot of medals and a few trophies over those years. And it got to a point where I was offered the chance to train for the national disabled swimming team. But I decided not to take it any further. I wasn’t sufficiently interested or motivated to take it to a more professional level, instead having my sights on things like my exams, university and my career beyond that.
I didn’t even know about the Paralympics back then. If I had been aware of it, and if it had been as widely covered as it is now, and if the right support, coaching and funding had been available, maybe I’d have thought differently, who knows? But at the time, I was more interested in other things. And I don’t regret my decision at all, I’ve been very successful on the route I did take through life. But when you watch the kind of performances that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, it’s impossible not to wonder how things could have been, potentially, with the right drive and determination.
So with all that said, I hope you enjoy this review of the Rio Paralympics, and I’ve created a Youtube playlist of highlights from Channel 4 as well.
Well Eye Never 