What can be done to bring athletes who compete in the Paralympic Games more international exposure? Originally answered on Dec. 27, 2015.
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Answer by Laura Hale, editor in chief of ParaSport News:
I'm digressing a bit, but to make a point. There needs to be a cultural shift to make people think about these defaults. If you want to increase visibility of Paralympic sports, then you can add "Able-Bodied" to the name. That would be a step too far for me, but in terms of leveling the playing field and increasing visibility, yeah, "Indian Men's Able-Bodied National Cricket Team" would be great because it would make you ask, "Why is the name this way?" and you'd immediately start to realize, "Wow. Maybe there is a women's team and a non-able bodied team." In fact, India's men's blind cricket team is one of the best in the world. It is seriously good. I doubt most Indians could name a single player on that team despite how great Shekar Naik is. If you're an Indian cricket fan and you don't know who he is, that's sad.
If someone today from the Rio Organizing Committee or the International Paralympic Committee came to me and said, "We want you to lead a campaign to increase the visibility of our athletes going into the Rio Games. What would you do?" I would do the following:
I would organize a series of workshops around the world, with NPCs and with ISFs to teach them how to write Wikipedia articles in a whole bunch of languages, so there would be an article about every single Paralympian going to Rio before they ever set foot in the country for the start of the Games. I'd also organize with national Paralympic committees (NPCs) and international sports federations (ISFs) to make sure there was a freely licensed picture of every single Rio-bound Paralympian on Wikimedia Commons so pictures could be used in articles all about athletes. I'd work with NPCs and ISFs to make sure there was an article about each and every different classification for their sport, and that each article had video on the page that explained the classification, or demonstrated what the classification "looks like" so people can understand it better. Classification is a major hurdle for understanding Paralympic sports.
I'd then encourage the Rio Organizing Committee to distribute copies of the articles about classification as printed books (as these are freely licensed) for journalists to reference during the Games. Lots of journalists prefer to have the paper to use (especially when it can lie flat) along with freely licensed videos (uploaded to Commons) that explain classifications that journalists can be used in their work. (It need not interfere with what broadcast rightsholders use.) I'd also try to have a few elite athlete bios available using Wikipedia articles as separate press reference books. I'd make sure these books were available in the local languages of the reporters; if your reporter is from the Ukraine, have it in Ukrainian. If your reporter is Slovak, have it in Slovak. It is amazing how little information is available about the elite athletes, and how inaccessible this becomes to the international media. In 2014 in Sochi, with all that was going on, the NPC had almost zero media information for the international press. We couldn't easily get background information on Ukrainian athletes despite the drama, because the NPC just didn't have the resources to produce a media guide. (Seriously, the information system it charged people big money to access in London was crap. Serious crap. Some English Wikipedia articles were better, and this was simpler to update.)
Wikipedia seems like a strange strategy, except for the fact that the quality of some of the content is pretty high and pretty useful. Para-swimming classification is a really good summary for how swimming works. B1 (classification) is a specific classification article for a number of vision-impaired sports. LW1 (classification) is a classification article for alpine skiing. They show you what can be done to explain this process. Also, the articles about individual athletes are getting a lot of views in many cases, and some of them are quite good. Ellie Cole, Teresa Perales and Eskender Mustafaiev all provide more information than you can get from any other source about these athletes. I know journalists in London (in 2012) and Sochi who were going to Wikipedia to use these articles, who were pulling information from the text to explain classification, or to use as background human interest information for articles they wrote about specific athletes. It just makes journalists' jobs so much easier. Journalists raise visibility.
That's my short-term solution. Sailing and 7-on-7 football really need to do this because getting cut from the Paralympic program in 2020 could spell the death of these sports. Other sports are being way more innovative and could keep them from being reconsidered in 2024.
And it isn't just journalists. During the 2012 Summer Paralympics, there were more than 1 million views to articles about the Paralympics, specific athletes and classification. You'd see huge spikes on articles after athletes won medals. These numbers quickly add up even when a sport is at its least visible, because people are searching for information. In the past 30 days, across all languages, Teresa Perales has had 1,800 views while Paralympic Games has had 48,000. 2016 Summer Paralympics has had 10,000 views in the past 30 days across languages. International Paralympic Committee has 4,000 views. 2015 Parapan American Games has had 1,158. Ellie Cole has had 1,200. Sarah Storey has had 1,100 views. Wheelchair rugby had 5,000 views across all languages. Goalball has had 8,900 views in the past 30 days across all languages. The Australian Paralympic Committee has data showing the Wikipedia articles related to it received more views than its own website. In November, just on English Wikipedia, the articles about the Paralympics had 367,000 views.
While I'm on that whole Wikipedia thing, I'd work with NPCs and ISFs to find the cited sources in articles about their athletes, their national teams, their countries and their sports. I'd then make sure that if they are cited, they receive targeted e-mails with press updates. If anyone has more than 10 articles, I'd be offering them media accreditation. Even if it needs to be offered late, get those people there. You don't want just people who follow at the last minute; you want the journos who have been reporting on these athletes the whole time.
There are other long-term solutions. In the United States, disability sports are increasingly becoming official university sports, complete with scholarship opportunities. There is talk about having collegiate national championships in several sports, including powerchair football, goalball and wheelchair basketball, and having these sports overseen by the NCAA. This process needs to be sped up in the U.S. The big conferences need to be brought on board, too, their varsity disability sports competitions need to be televised on major networks. You need to be able to watch Big Ten Network broadcasts of women's wheelchair basketball. You need full scholarships for these athletes and for athletic departments to actively recruit overseas. Media departments need to ruthlessly promote these athletes.
Long term, better strategies about sports journos and bloggers need to be rethought. Disability sports organizations need to work extensively with sports journalists. Paralympic sport needs to actively shed the "Look at the cripple and their inspiring story! They should be an inspiration to all of us!" narrative that the media too frequently go for. It isn't "This world-class athlete just broke a world record and won a gold medal" — it's "After struggling with having lost her leg following a tragic accident involving a garbage truck backing into her while on the job as a realtor, she took up athletics and now seeks to represent Australia at the Paralympics." No. No. I mean, yes, this matters ... but it needs to stop being the narrative. Really, it does. Paralympic sports won't get more international exposure if they continue to serve just as inspiration porn for able-bodied people. Paralympic sports will get more exposure by being treated as elite sports, featuring elite athletes who train day in and day out for funding.
Many other things need to be addressed, but for a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution going into Rio, that's mostly what I would do.