ONE of the joys of the Paralympics has been the sheer diversity: the way in which the same challenge is met in so many different ways.
To take just one example from para-swimming: the 100-metre breast-stroke for the SB6 category. The background here is that SB6 includes people whose limbs are affected in all sorts of ways, possibly from short stature, possibly through total absence of one limb, but all participants are pushing their bodies to the limits to go faster.
As they do this, the whole ideal of breast-stroke is redefined, as participants vary from “normal” breast-stroke: in Sunday’s final, GB’s Maisie Summers Newton, of short stature, employed a double stroke with arms and legs between breaths, to compensate for her limbs’ lack of length; Liu Daomin, from China, looked more conventional from above, as she swam one long stroke per breath, but, with just one arm, she always had to compensate in how she propelled herself forward.
Between them, they produced a sensational race, separated by barely a second over 100 metres, thanks to totally different techniques stemming from totally different body shapes.
Even more dramatic has been the high jump, with some hopping forward, and others half-running, and still others having also to carry their blade over the bar.
Of course, these methods are not unique to Paris: they have been continually honed over the years in Paralympic sport, but the innovations come thick and fast, because body shapes are so diverse. It is a marked contrast to mainstream athletics, where innovation is rare: the high jump, for example, has had just one great moment of innovation in the past 100 years, when Dick Fosbury created the “flop” in 1964, and suddenly jumped ten per cent higher than anyone had ever done before.
Why did no one see it before him? It didn’t need technology: it just needed vision. How many more innovations are there to be had, but ableist eyes are too blind to see them? For it is not a deliberate blinkeredness; it is a blinkeredness driven by the sheer power of convention, of following the way that it is done because that is the way that it has always been done.
Para-athletes are compelled to think outside the box because their lives have always been outside the box. They find ways of making their bodies work that able-bodied athletes don’t have the imagination to see.
But, crucially, it makes for riveting viewing. Arguably, and I hesitate to say it, they make conventional sport look just that little bit boring.
The Revd Robert Stanier is the Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.