spirit in motion

Bow was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in Tokyo as accredited press for the Olympics. Unfortunately, we couldn’t extend that run to the Paras. Like many people, we were looking forward to watching the competition from home, whether that involved staying up late or catching up early – whatever it entailed. At the previous two Paralympics, full multi-camera edited coverage was simply not available – as in, the cameras and TV trucks were not there. This time, things would be different. We thought.

Channel 4 had got the rights and went hellfor-leather promoting its Paralympics coverage, even going so far as to promise unequivocally that ‘all sports’ would be shown on its website.

It was not to be. In the end, the viewer had a choice of only six live feeds with sporadic commentary from non-specialists for anything other than the biggest events. For the archery, it appeared that none of the compound competitions – open or W1, individual or team – were shown live at any point, and only the last three days of recurve finals made it to live broadcast. Phoebe Paterson Pine’s remarkable gold medal run was not shown, although Rosie Jones, presenter of the roundup show The Last

Leg made it to the venue, and ‘Triple P’ did a TV interview with Claire Balding the next day.

Phoebe’s medal was reduced to a few seconds on highlights packages in a sea of other Paralympic medals for Great Britain; another smiling face on a podium. Asking around on Bow’s social media, this appeared a typical viewer experience for most countries.

The problem with this is that people get inspired to take up sport through watching competition, not through highlights, back stories or the now-ubiquitous reactions of presenters and family to medal events. Countless thousands of athletes, para and able-bodied, have been inspired to take up sport through seeing it, on TV, at the Olympics or Paralympics. In the name of packaging sport as entertainment, that element is clearly no longer very important.