Tokyo lights up to offer inspiration during a testing time
Ellie Simmonds, one of the British flagbearers, held her phone up into the night sky and, for a moment, just stood and turned around on the spot, trying somehow to capture and distil a moment that will always remain with her.
Beside her was archer John Stubbs, the kind of individual you imagine is not given to shows of emotion, though this seemed an occasion which had overwhelmed him, too. Both had been present in london and Rio de Janeiro at the outset of those Paralympics, yet the emptiness of this vast stadium could not obscure a deeper significance.
it came from the long months of isolation that have preceded this event for so many competitors. Stubbs is not afraid to say that he clung to his sport for meaning after a motorcycle accident 32 years ago, so devastating that it hardly bears contemplation.
He was clipped from his bike by a car, sent flying into a verge and crawled back for help only to be hit by another vehicle. He needed a 68-pint blood transfusion after severing the femoral arteries in both his legs, one of which was amputated. His straightforward life as a fabrication engineer was never the same.
‘You are talking to somebody that’s really suffered with real bad psychology and mental health issues,’ he said, before venturing out into this ceremony. ‘i am not embarrassed to say that i suffered with mental health issues after my accident. i was 24. Sport was my saviour.
‘Covid has done us no favours but the Games being postponed and then it being announced they were going on 12 months later in 2021 gave everyone with a disability aspiring to be on the team a meaning for life. To be honest with you, who knows where a lot of us might be...’
The opening ceremony was far more vibrant than the more muted
Olympics equivalent, which had seemed to reflect the conflicted state Tokyo found itself in as it embarked on two huge sporting events. There were fewer references to the pandemic, even though Japan is struggling to contain the delta variant which has brought a fifth wave.
Fireworks were launched in the colours of the flags of each participating delegation. And the ceremony’s choreography revolved around the story of a little one-winged plane — enacted by a child in a wheelchair, watching others of its kind fly and struggling to believe it could do the same.
A troupe of rock guitarists arrived in a fluorescent truck, which helps. But it is a dancer who removes a prosthetic limb, throws it into the night sky and passes its ambient light to the child, who finally puts aside her inhibitions. The plane flies. ‘We have wings’, was the night’s theme.
The athletes who processed through, many wheeling themselves, some on prosthetic limbs, a few with guide dogs, yet more guided by helpers, would agree that inspiration comes from all kinds of improbable places. it’s more important than gold, silver and bronze.
Few flagbearers provide more inspiration than the one who led from the front here, carrying the first flag.
Alia issa, who is barely out of her teens, is the first woman to compete for a Paralympics Refugee Team. The smallpox she suffered at the age of four damaged her nervous system and left her with difficulty speaking. it seemed slightly risky when she was placed at the centre of a press conference top table here on Monday to discuss her role. But she quickly erased any such notion. ‘i want to say to other women who have disabilities not to stay at home,’ she said. ‘Try every day with sports, to be outside in the world.’ She will compete in the club throw.
Of course, life is not always so straightforward for Paralympians. Belgium’s flag delegation were remembering wheelchair racer Marieke Vervoort, who was in their number at the Rio ceremony. While competing there, she described living with the pain of an incurable, degenerative spinal disease. She ended her life in Belgium in 2019.
The Afghanistan athletes, who were plunged into that country’s chaos as they prepared to compete, did not make it here. A Paralympic volunteer carried their flag.
There was no repeat of the Olympic opening ceremony finale, when Naomi Osaka dramatically stepped out of the shadows to light the cauldron.
Three Japanese Paralympians shared the responsibility, wheeling their chairs up the ramp, each of them holding a flame.
in the words of the legendary advertisement for the Paralympics after the london Games had just finished: ‘Thanks for the warm-up’.