POSTED: September 14th 2011
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NEIL WILSON: The threat to the Paralympics - Pistorius or the weather?
THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain’s most successful Paralympian, has criticised the double amputee Oscar Pistorius for seeking to compete in both Olympic and Paralympic Games in London next year. The former wheelchair athlete feels it diminishes Paralympians by making the event of secondary importance.
April Holmes, an American amputee who holds the women’s record in the same 400 metres event as Pistorius, disagrees. “It would be awesome. It would prove to people that God is still in the blessing business.”
Let me side with the American. Pistorius’s story, his determination to compete against the elite able-bodied and his successful challenge to IAAF rules at the Court of Arbitration has shone more attention on the Paralympic Games than any other competitor has in its half-century. The event is enhanced, not diminished, by the interest Pistorius has brought to it.
I met twelve amputees brought together by the company which developed their racing prosthetics last week, each of them sporting successes and each with a heart-rending story to tell of birth defects, car, train and boating accidents. It was the 13th though whose story has turned a public focus on the Paralympics that it has never before enjoyed.
No Paralympic Games has charged admission and yet London was predicting huge sales at prices up to $75 when tickets went on sale last week. Sebastian Coe talked of a real possibility that the two million tickets will sell out. There can be no doubting that Pistorius is a prime factor in that.
Holmes makes the very valid argument that amputees in the Paralympics have all competed at some level with able-bodied competitors. “You have to at small, community meets in your own country,” she says. “I’ve beaten a few and been beaten by a few.
“I’m part of Al Joyner’s training group in California. I practise with Olympic athletes every day. You want to be the greatest you go where the greatest are, you compete against the best. How can that devalue the Paralympics? We are motivational in ourselves.”
Grey-Thompson’s argument is perverse. Pistorius is not the first to compete at both. Marla Runyan, an American legally blind, won Paralympic gold medals in 1992 and 1996 and in 2000 and 2004 ran in the Olympic Games. He would not even be the first amputee. Natalie du Toit, a South African Paralympic swimming champion, competed in the 2008 Olympics.
Did anybody suggest that they diminished the Paralympic Games. Indeed, Grey-Thompson won five gold medals at the Paralympics Runyan competed at but far from her achievements being diminished by Runyan’s subsequent Olympic appearances Grey-Thompson was honoured with a Damehood by the Queen.
I think Holmes got closer to being right about next year’s Paralympics. “I think we’re more likely to be diminished in London by the weather!”
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 · London 2012 · Neil Wilson · Paralympics · Oscar Pistorius · Tanni Grey-Thompson · April Holmes
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