Games offer a beacon of light amid dark clouds

Sport

Malik Ouzia

IT was only at the start of last year that International Paralympic Committee chiefs were predicting the Tokyo Paralympics would make history by becoming the first Games to sell out ahead of their opening ceremony. There were more than three million ticket applications in the first ballot and after the turbulent build-up to Rio 2016 — when only a late surge in interest turned a doomed Paralympics into the second-best ever attended — Tokyo seemed to be heading for a celebration of disability sport to rival, and maybe even surpass, London 2012. And yet as that belated opening ceremony began this afternoon, the same cloud that hovered over Tokyo ahead of the Olympics a month ago was lingering again — and may yet prove a little harder to dissipate. In the wake of the Olympics, public health officials voiced genuine fears that the Paralympics might have to be cancelled, the two events coming as a pair only until one was out of the way, leaving the other potentially exposed. The financial incentive so central to keeping the first half of the Tokyo 2020 show on the road was nothing like as lucrative when it came to the second, and the impact of welcoming the world mid-pandemic was no longer a phantom menace, the facts and figures laid bare as the Olympics, albeit largely indirectly, contributed to what is a continuing rise in Covid cases. Would the Japanese people, so extraordinarily hospitable earlier this summer, have the appetite to smile on through again? And what of the athletes, some — though by no means all — of whom suffer from conditions that make Covid a much more potent threat? As the Games get under way, it seems yet another round of ‘arigatos’ (Japanese for thanks) are already due. Covid aside, the shadow of events in Afghanistan is also sure to loom large over these Games. The Afghan flag was set to be carried at the opening ceremony as a show of solidarity, but with no athletes marching behind it. Zakia Khudadadi, set to become her nation’s first female Paralympian, and teammate Hossain Rasouli have both been unable to travel to Japan as a result of the chaos at home. Yet amid the despair, we still find stories of inspiration. Abbas Karim swims with medal hopes for the Refugee Paralympic Team, having fled Afghanistan as a teenager. The British wheelchair rugby team include former RAF patrol commander Stuart Robinson, who lost his legs to a Taliban roadside bomb in Helmand in 2013. IPC president Andrew Parsons spoke of how the estimated 15 per cent of people living with a disability around the world need these Games to act as a launchpad for a global movement of their own, “WeThe15”, a permanent force for social change akin to the LGBTQ+ community or Black Lives Matter campaign. But it may be that the rest of the population needs them almost as much. The Olympics were supposed to offer light at the end of the tunnel, acting as a symbol of global resilience. Yet it is the Paralympics that are so often shown to have the greatest potential to empower, highlighting what Japanese wheelchair tennis star Shingo Kunieda beautifully called the “infinite possibilities of humankind”. After 18 months in which the tales of adversity that are inherent to every Paralympic story have become more relatable than ever, perhaps it is the second of Tokyo’s Games that can deliver a dose of hope.