Paralympic Games in Vancouver
VANCOUVER (The National Post)– Canada kicked off another giant party Friday for the world’s best athletes, hoping to reignite the sense of pride that stormed the country during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
But this party, started years before with a plan for this country to host its first Paralympic Games, isn’t just about waving the Canadian flag or seeing if the country’s athletes can top the podium more frequently than those of 43 other participating nations.
It’s about an event that organizers say should help change the way people view others who are missing limbs or eyesight or have bodies that don’t function the way theirs do.
As far as Sir Phil Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee, is concerned this is as much about “able-bodied people” – a term he detests – celebrating the achievements of others who have overcome the physical and emotional challenges that come with having a “disability” – another term he hates – than it is about sports.
“That’s the difference between ‘Paralympians’ and ‘disability’ ” he said. “Disability is negativity, it is the collectivized marginalization of some mythical group of people. I never use the D-word. Over time you can change peoples’ perceptions, and the Games coming to town do that in absolute bagfuls.”
Smiling broadly and barely able to contain her glee at the arrival of the Games, Carla Qualtrough, president of the Canadian Paralympic Committee, also made that point on Friday as she welcomed journalists to “the first day of the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games.”
“As a sport event, the Paralympic Games are about extraordinary athletes who are exceptionally talented at their chosen sport,” she said. “As a movement, the Paralympic movement is about changing perceptions, dispelling myths and challenging assumptions.”
More than 60,000 people packed into BC Place on Friday to celebrate that point at the opening ceremony. Based around the theme “One Inspires Many,” the celebration featured a moving tribute to Terry Fox, the one-legged runner who inspired a nation with his Marathon of Hope.
There were other Canadian and international athletes included in the ceremony, apart from the 1,300 competitors and officials who came from 44 countries to compete in these Games.
Chantal Petitclerc, Canada’s most decorated Paralympian with 21 medals, and Aimee Mullins, a double-amputee who went on to set world records in the 100- and 200-metre runs and long jump, helped tell the history of the Paralympic movement. So too did Rick Hansen, who told the audience about the people who motivated him as he undertook his Man In Motion tour around the world.
The tribute to Fox was delivered by CTV News anchor Lloyd Robertson, who recounted how he met this young man who wanted to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research.
Fox’s legacy played an important part throughout the ceremony and even the lighting of the cauldron. His parents, Betty and Rolly Fox, brought the Paralympic torch into BC Place and illuminated an illustrious row of torchbearers. The Foxes lit the torch of Daniel Wesley, who won 12 medals in wheelchair racing and alpine skiing. Wesley, in turn, lit the torch of Marni Abbott-Peter, one of the world’s best wheelchair basketball players and the honorary mayor of the 2010 athletes village.
But the final honours were left to 15-year-old Zach Beaumont, a young man who has yet to participate in a Paralympics but wants so much to do so. Beaumont, who had his right leg amputated as a baby, has become an avid athlete and one day wishes to compete in snowboarding at the Paralympics. He was selected as the final torchbearer by Betty Fox.
Herve Lord, a Canadian sledge hockey player from St. Pamphile, Que., took the athletes’ oath; Linda Kirton of Abbotsford, B.C., took the officials’ oath.
The Paralympic flag was raised by two members of the Canadian Forces’ Soldier On program: Sgt. Karen McCoy, who lost a leg to cancer, and Master Cpl. Mike Trauner, who lost both legs and partial use of his right arm in an attack in Afghanistan in 2008.
Like its Olympic counterpart, the Paralympic ceremony was sold out, a prelude to what the Vancouver Organizing Committee predicts will be a sellout of many of the 64 medal events taking place in five sports at four venues.
Over the next 10 days the party will spread out to venues in Vancouver and Whistler, where 650 of the world’s best skiers, wheelchair curlers and sledge hockey players will challenge each other to perform their best.
The Paralympics are perhaps one-fifth the size of the Olympics and just 10 to 15 per cent of the 10,000 media who came for the Olympics stayed for the Paralympics. They’re vastly outnumbered by the 5,500 blue-jacketed volunteers Vanoc says it has recruited for the event.
But where the Olympics was an ostentatious affair that closed down wide swaths of the downtown and turned parking lots into beer halls and city parks into sponsor pavilions, the Paralympics are a much more cozy affair.
The LiveCity pavilion park near BC Place is still open, and the Royal Mint has moved to the Coliseum-styled Vancouver Public Library. And on Friday, workers were erecting portable fencing on the street in front of the Vancouver Convention Centre in the hope that the massive crowds that came to view the Olympic Cauldron will be motivated to return for the Paralympic Cauldron as well.
Vancouver Sun
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