POSTED: February 24th 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Sarah Storey setting puzzle over identity of the Paralympics

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON: Oscar Pistorius tried to compete in both Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2008 and failed famously. Natalie Du Toit, his fellow South African, and Natalia Partyka, a Polish table tennis player, tried and succeeded.

Now, in Britain, multiple Paralympic gold medallist Sarah Storey is attempting to become the first from her country to achieve the double and is likely to succeed. Last weekend the woman born without a left hand helped Britain’s pursuit team win gold at track cycling’s World Cup round in Manchester.

She won swimming gold at the 2004 Paralympics, cycling golds at the 2008 Paralympics and now, perhaps, golds at both Paralympics and Olympics in 2012.

Remarkable, certainly. Inspiring even. But where does it leave the Paralympics? If Paralympians aspire to higher things at the Olympics are they not saying it is the premier event, that the Paralympics is not a parallel Games but a subsidiary affair?

Should the Paralympics allow itself to become a feeder event to its big brother? Or should it define itself more sharply.

If an athlete is good enough to compete in the Olympics in any sport is he or she not telling the world that they are ineligible for Games for those not fully able?

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain’s most bemedalled Paralympian, foresaw the problem when Pistorious’s prosthetics were creating waves four years ago. “I can see why he wants to go, the competition, the fame and the money, but I’d like to see him get that at the Paralympics.”

Eligible competitors

In other words, the Paralympics are seen as a second cousin much removed from the real thing. Which is sad, and will be made sadder every time one of its eligible competitors says they are aiming to qualify for the Olympics first.

Phil Craven, the British president of International Paralympic Commitee and de facto member of the International Olympic Committee as a consequence, said of Pistorious that he understood his ambitions. “He wants to compete against the fastest. Those fastest for the moment are at the Olympic Games.”

For the moment? When science manages to create artificial devices that make Paralympic athletes faster than Olympians the game will be up. What need then for two separate Games.

And it may be on the horizon. A motorised ankle joint is on the verge of production. Pistorious’s blades already enable him to use 25pc less oxygen over 400 metres than a runner with two limbs of his own, according to university research.

If Sarah Storey proves by her selection next year for the Olympic Games that her disability is not a disability at all in the sport she has chosen, why should she be eligible for the Paralympics.

You could applaud her over-coming disability. Or you could say that as a cyclist she does not have a disability.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books  

Keywords · Neil Wilson · Pistorius · Storey · Grey-Thompson

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