Cheats bring shame to the ‘ag-shame’ Olympics version
At the 2004 Paralympics, I asked a South African athlete what had become of his teammate, a swimmer as I recall. She had competed at the 2000 Games in Sydney and was not in the team for Athens. He paused and took a small while: “I think she got fixed.”
It’s not done to suggest that disabled athletes are broken in the first place, but Paralympians have a black humour, one that takes a little getting used to.
The swimmer had, perhaps, had a procedure that corrected what had qualified her to be a Paralympian.
A quick guide to the Paralympic categories: athletes are classified according to the severity of their disability, the number of limbs amputated, the level of cerebral palsy, the depth of their eyesight.
It took me a while to get used to the seemingly endless abbreviations, and when I did I realised how daft it was for me to repeat them for readers. So I would describe the physical obstacle the athlete had. It made more sense.
The proper way to find this out was to ask the athlete: “What is your disability?”
A colleague would routinely ask: “What is wrong with you?” until he was put in his place.
However, he would have been within his rights to ask: “What is wrong with Paralympian athletes these days?”, as in these days of uncovering past and current wrongs, more stories of athletes cheating the classification system have come to light.
This week, the Guardian told of how a classification expert reported there was widespread cheating, with athletes attempting to be more severely disabled than they were.
The expert had seen athletes “drugging themselves with Valium, rolling in the snow and taping their limbs before classification assessments”, and a “family from south Asia attempted to bribe the expert in order to have their son classified in a bracket where he would compete against more severely disabled athletes”.
The lure of a Paralympic medal and the potential rewards that come with it are driving some to cheat the system with the same gusto as able-bodied athletes.
It shouldn’t be necessary to point it out, but for some the Paralympics are the feel-good Games, the “ag-shame” tournament. These Games lift the spirit and provide lessons in overcoming obstacles, but in the five Paralympics I have