Para champions deserve funding parity with able-bodied athletes
It has been a wonderful week in London but the money awarded to para-athletes must rise
Ithought Ed Warner made a very astute point in the Daily Telegraph pages yesterday, in the fact that the chairman of UK Athletics is urging UK Sport to create funding parity for Olympic and Paralympic medal success. As he says, “there’s still masses of clear water” between the investment into para sports and able-bodied sport and like Warner, I also agree that the athletes and the governing bodies should not rest in campaigning until medals are regarded of equal value by the funding agency.
That is 100 per cent right in my opinion. There are details to look at, such as the number of medals available in Paralympic sports and the strength and depth of the fields of individual events, but when you look at what UK Athletics get, £27million of funding for the Rio-tokyo cycle for Olympians and £11.8million for Paralympians, there is not parity.
For example, if you take just the medal successes at the Games in Rio, GB Olympians won two gold, one silver and four bronze medals. GB Paralympians won 33 medals in Rio, 15 of them gold. That doesn’t sound like parity to me, even though UK Sport launched their own defence. The T54 men’s wheelchair racing, my old class here on the track, has long been rightly viewed as the greatest talent pool anywhere in paraathletics, and winning gold in T54 is, and should, be seen as the equivalent of Mo Farah’s gold medals.
I’d say two things: it’s more costly for the para-sports, in general, for the requirements of needing assistants, helpers, equipment and so on, and I believe our stories are just as inspirational, if not more, than Olympic medallists due to the adversity that many para athletes have often encountered in their lives.
My own experience is that I have been told over and over again by people I meet that they took more from the Paralympics than the Olympics in 2012. It speaks for itself: para-sport is bigger than just sport, because it draws in an
‘I believe our stories are just as inspiring, if not more, than Olympic medallists due to adversity’
audience way beyond the casual fan. Pick just one story from this event, say field athlete Aled Davies, and here’s real inspiration.
He was born with fibular hemimelia – a congenital absence of the fibula – and in five years since he was first taken into the hearts of the British public, he has transformed his physique and is nearing the distance with the shot put where his ambition is to be at the Commonwealth Games in 2022.
I love hearing that, and that the German long jumper Markus Rehm wants to be in the Olympics. Let’s encourage this. It’s all progress. Of these championships themselves, I think, after six days of competition, we can say honestly that London 2012 created a fan base and that is part of the legacy itself.
Sport is also about younger, faster, higher, longer and we are seeing that from a Great Britain team that is as strong as any in the world.
Sitting on the other side working as an analyst and interviewer for Channel 4 has also allowed me to see and speak to many more athletes, from all over the world, which I have never had the chance to do before. The message from them has been clear. We know how to organise and run events which focus on the athlete first better than any country in the world. I’ve heard that time and time again.
Add to that the ticket sales, which we are hearing will reach the 300,000 mark by the end of this 10-day event, and London has shown that we are capable of bringing in fans to a sports entertainment event.
The atmosphere has been remarkable, and the British public supporting this really ought to know how much it means to us as athletes and how it stimulates greatness in the athletic competition itself. They inspire us. There are several high-profile athletes, as a result, calling on the International Paralympic Committee and the organisers to come back to London in 2019 for the next championships.
Given that the IPC do not have a host city yet and given the standards of the sporting action, and the volume of the crowd, I reckon there’s every chance.
The only thing I would have changed would have been to stage these championships after the able-bodied worlds. If we’d got them to go first, it’s a safe bet that the organisers would have sold even more tickets.