JONNIE PEACOCK COLUMN
The double Paralympic 100m champion writes exclusively for Metro
I’VE been lucky as a professional athlete to continue training amid coronavirus with the goal of racing at the Tokyo Paralympics later this year. But it is always in my mind that I am one of the privileged few currently because so many people are unable to be active or do sport currently – specifically those with disabilities.
With sport all but decimated in this country, I worry that the losers will be those who have had to go a year without sport and will simply walk away from it.
It’s almost 12 months since young athletes will have been able to get out and hone their skills. In that situation, it is a real test of someone’s desire to want to do it and achieve their dreams at the Paralympics one day. For young athletes and young people with disability who want to emulate the sort of things me, Hannah Cockroft, David Weir and many, many others have done in recent years, there is a problem and that is that they simply can’t train, let alone compete.
Life can take over and we don’t want our future Paralympic stars to be reliant on tech because they have been indoors for so long lately, forgetting what it’s like to be outside and competing or training.
This is because only the ‘elite’ athletes (myself included) get to use the track. That’s understandable during a pandemic but this has gone on for a year now.
This will affect Paralympic sport in this country but I think there will be a lag. You won’t see the effects instantly, until we’re reliant on these guys in five to ten years’ time.
They will be the ones leading the charge for medals but who right now aren’t even able to participate.
We are blocking pathways for these people. There are many more opportunities out there for ablebodied people at the moment.
I remember as a youngster spending literally days Googling somewhere I could participate in disability sport and this has more barriers than ablebodied sport.
I just hope because disability sport has these extra barriers it is not an after-thought in the government’s return to sport plans. That would be heartbreaking. Thankfully now there is the Parasport.org.uk website, where 3,350 accessible opportunities across the UK are listed. There were none at launch in 2019.
My hope is that things have shifted over ten, 20, 50 years and that we are part of the equation now. In another 50 years’ time, I wouldn’t want these conversations to still be happening.
All we want is to be treated as equals – no judgement on appearance, no preconceived notion of anything. Just the same access to sport for disabled people as for everyone else.
This needs to happen now and the government has to make a conscious effort to ensure it does happen.
In the back of my mind, I have the way things have been done in the past but we have to be optimistic about the future. The opportunity is there to do this right. We have to take it – and that means including disabled people as well.
The government has made statements about equality and where disability sits in that, and now it has to stand by those words and help everyone, not just a few.
We cannot afford to let disability sport go backwards in this country.
Jonnie Peacock is Toyota ambassador for Parasport; a new digital hub to empower disabled people to become more active. It will create a vibrant online community for participants, coaches and parents to seek out new opportunities and share their experiences of the benefits of taking part in physical activity. Register your club or find activities near you at Parasport.org.uk