Super-Celebration Monday
I have heard it said that some people don’t like Mondays but I am writing this blog post on what must be a Monday to end all Mondays for celebrations. It is the morning after the closing ceremony of the Rio Paralympic Games.
So the first thing to celebrate is that Brazil has staged a fantastic Games – both Olympic and Paralympic – but particularly the latter. Just three weeks ago there were great concerns about shortage of funds and resources, low ticket sales and whether the athletes would be back to competing in front of family and friends. I was lucky enough to go briefly to the Beijing Paralympics and saw how the Chinese embraced disabled sport. I was in the Birds Nest Stadium at 10am on a Tuesday morning, not much in the way of excitement – just a few heats for various events and definitely no medals to be won. But there were 50,000 plus people there, creating a great atmosphere. London 2012 carried that on and Paralympians were competing in front of full houses at nearly every stage in every sport. Of course, for both the Chinese and London, it undoubtedly helped that the home teams were winning so many medals. Nevertheless, Rio turned out in style and did the Games proud.
Celebration number two has to be for Paralympic GB. The 264 athletes won 147 medals in total, smashing the 120 won in London, and including 64 Gold medals, 12% of the total on offer. And they did it across a wider range of sports – 11 disciplines in total. It’s amazing, a truly brilliant achievement and it has been a nice touch that there have been many references to people who play the National Lottery week in week out which provides the funding which underpins elite sport at this level – it makes Team GB feel like the people’s team.
More widely, celebration number three has to be every one of the 4,350 Paralympic athletes who took part. Inspiring back-stories detailing many, many triumphs over adversity make us ordinary mortals feel inadequate. And while bean counters will continue to mumble about measuring the legacy, anyone with common sense can see that the last three Paralympic Games have transformed the way disabled people are viewed and treated in society. There is still some way to go, not least in employment equality, but in everyday life, we all now know that disabled people have the potential to produce performances that equal and exceed those of able-bodied people. We look on them with respect, and not pity.
Let’s celebrate humour. I have seen quite a bit of the Rio Paralympics through the lens of The Last Leg – the comedy/chat programme that has been on TV each night of the Games. This show started in London, became a mainstream show and has produced some fantastic shows during Rio. Shock – disabled people are funny – and it’s ok to laugh with them, and more edgily, sometimes at aspects of disabled sport. But behind very joke there is deep respect for the athletes and their huge achievements.
Finally, to bring it all home, it is an ELBA and London Works celebration day today. It’s the “passing out” event for our Spring EaGLEs programme. EaGLEs takes bright graduates from east London who are either unemployed or under-employed who cannot get graduate level employment because they do not have the social and family connections, intelligence and networks that are enjoyed by young people from better-off backgrounds who have been to Russel Group universities. We give them intensive training and then six months placements in prestigious City and Canary Wharf firms. It gives them a break and a chance to shine, and they have shown that once a barrier is broken down, then the raw talent and drive wins through, with most securing jobs and careers they otherwise would not get access to. And that’s a reason to celebrate.
