Positives aplenty at Paralympics
RIO 2016: Hosts are taking a financial hit, but the Games are a success in many ways
RIO DE JANEIRO — A city doesn’t stop being what it is for anything momentous: an election, a sporting event, even a disaster.
So Rio was still Rio as the Olympics waned and the Paralympics loomed — a noisy and tranquil, breathtaking and disheartening, benign and violent, fragrant and fetid home to six million people.
As always, it was incumbent upon these Games to work their way into the hearts and minds of the host city’s populace. And in the wake of bad news from local organizers — scandalous budget shortfalls and poor advance ticket sales — the Paralympics seemed imperilled before they started. But the public trough was tapped for US$20 million to bridge the funding gap, and two million tickets were offered for US$9 or less each, making them accessible to residents who earn, on average, just US$550 per month.
More than 1.9 million of those ducats have been snapped up, second only to London 2012, and the show has gone on, because it must. Yes, it has been an expensive education for the hosts — some US$2.8 billion spent on the two Games — but Rio has passed the test, flying the yellow and green over a spectacle South America has never before hosted.
“I think it’s fantastic what’s going on,” International Paralympic Committee president Sir Philip Craven said Monday. “We’ve got to the hearts of the Cariocas.”
It’s true. The Paralympics reached the halfway point Monday and there is plenty of life at most venues. It is loudest, proudest and most colourful in the Olympic Park. That site on Saturday was a veritable carnival as 167,000 people flooded the grounds for sports such as wheelchair basketball, swimming, cycling, goalball, tennis and judo.
Crowds have picked up for athletics, too, though the upper deck of the massive Olympic Stadium, 24 kilometres away from the centre of the action, is usually empty.
Naturally, Brazilian athletes have felt the love more deeply than most.
“At the time I entered the stadium and I saw it was packed, and the supporters shouting, suddenly my legs became so happy and they ran alone and I went behind them,” said Petrucio Ferreira Dos Santos, who followed his dancing legs to a world record in the T47 100-metre sprint.
But the Cariocas have opened their hearts to others, and the Canadian women’s sitting volleyball team has played in front of generous crowds approaching 7,000 for matches against Brazil and the Netherlands.
“That’s huge. Nothing comes close to that,” team member Katelyn Wright said. “I thought it was electric in there. It was so amazing. We had a lot of crowd support against Netherlands. It was pretty great to hear them cheering Canada.”
Certainly, these are not perfect Paralympics. There will be a financial hangover and other issues to face. An Algerian goalball team arrived six days late and missed two matches. The IPC is investigating.
The number of world records set by athletes from nations like Ukraine, China and Uzbekistan has produced questions about doping control measures in those countries. The IPC will look into that, too, Craven said. But there hasn’t been a positive test since the Games started, which might be a positive sign.
Despite the challenges, organizers, volunteers and spectators have made these Games work. They run for just six more days. Will there be a tangible legacy? Will these Paralympics change perception? Craven thinks it is already happening.
“The only way of really changing perceptions is by the general public having positive experiences and a section of their brains awakening to a new fact. Before you inspire the world, maybe you excite the world. It’s positive experiences that count, and there’s probably been over a million of those here.”
The man is given to hyperbole, but that’s pretty typical Paralympic parlance. If it takes four years of sweat and sacrifice to get here, it’s certainly worth milking the moment while the world, or even a slice of it, is watching, learning and coming away impressed, perhaps inspired.