London ready to rise again for its golden heroes
The World Para Athletics Championships starting tonight will be the biggest and best ever staged – and home hopes have never been higher, writes Gareth A Davies
The London 2012 Paralympic Games were a monument to the triumph of the human spirit, with new standards set on so many levels: in performance and organisation, marketing and ticket sales, across a swathe of sports.
Yet nowhere was the Paralympic movement’s distillation of human endeavour felt more keenly than in the stadium, replete every night with 80,000 adoring fans, the great British public in thrall at witnessing diehard sportsmen and women pushing their bodies to the extremes. It was deep, utterly magnetic, and with a staggering two million tickets sold, the coming of age for the Paralympic Games as bona fide sports entertainment.
That legacy from 2012 has impacted on the 2017 World Para Athletics Championships, which get under way tonight inside the London Stadium. More than 250,000 spectators have bought tickets to watch 1,100 athletes from 95 countries compete in 202 events over 10 days.
To put into perspective the seeds sown for the growth in the Olympic Stadium five years ago, these World Para Athletics Championships are already the biggest and most competitive event ever outside a Paralympic Games. Indeed, the numbers of spectator tickets sold for this event are more than all the world championships of the past combined.
In Lyon four years ago, a mere smattering of supporters watched the stars from London perform. Doha, in 2015, fared better, but the United Kingdom, the spiritual home of the Paralympic movement, has the support of the public like no other country.
“This being a London event has made this another huge leap forward,” Sir Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), told
The Daily Telegraph. “We know there will be 20-30,000 people in the stadium every day. We have never had big crowds at this event before.”
Craven is stepping down in September after 12 years, having overseen the Paralympic movement’s growth to the level where Ban Ki-moon, then secretary-general of the United Nations, was moved last year to comment that “mega sports such as the Paralympics have the potential to advance peace and human rights”. And he is leaving his last major championships on a high.
There are greater numbers of accredited media – over 800 for this event, the eighth edition of the World Para Athletics Championships – than for any Paralympic Winter Games. Moreover, for the first time it is being held in the same city and summer as the International Association of Athletics Federations equivalent, creating another historic milestone for the Paralympic movement. The IAAF event begins next month.
When the World Para Athletics Championships open this evening, all broadcast records will be broken, with more rights-holders than ever before: 20 broadcasters from around the world have signed up for coverage. Channel 4 will televise the event in the UK, showing 30 hours in total.
There will be no shortage of local stars on show. The British team claimed 31 medals – 13 golds, nine silver, nine bronze – in these championships in 2015 in Doha. And for this event, 21 Rio Paralympic medallists, including 10 champions, join forces in a 51-strong team that features stand-outs Hannah Cockroft, Aled Davies, Jonnie Peacock and Richard Whitehead, all of whom
‘London has the biggest and most passionate crowds – that makes you go faster’
also topped the podium at the London Stadium five years ago.
They will be joined by fellow Rio gold medallists Hollie Arnold, Paul Blake, Jo Butterfield, Kadeena Cox, Sophie Hahn and Georgie Hermitage. Preparation is second to none, with £11.8million of UK Sport funding for GB Para athletics between 2017 and the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics.
British wheelchair racing star Cockroft believes the marketing for this event was only rivalled by London 2012. “I’m on billboards all over, it’s nice people know my name,” said the 24-year-old, looking forward to her return to the stadium in which she won two of her five Paralympic gold medals.
As ever, sport is about the stars getting younger and faster, and two teenagers not to be missed are South Africa’s double amputee sprinter Ntando Mahlangu, who won silver at the 2016 Rio Paralympics at 14 and could challenge Britain’s Whitehead in the T42 200metres final, and British debutant Zak Skinner, a partially-sighted T13 sprinter and jumper who has excelled this year. Skinner is the son of the former England and Harlequins rugby union player Mick Skinner.
“When I think about London, it gives me butterflies,” said Cockroft. “London always gives us the biggest crowds, the most supportive and passionate crowds. That gives you something, makes you go that little bit faster. They know our names, they care about what we’re doing, and that makes it so exciting. It makes me a little bit teary-eyed and that’s how it’s going to feel coming back.”
Her words will resonate. Such is the power of the Paralympic flame.