‘The Paralympics not Being Broadcast on the BBC Shows the Underlying Societal Bias Against People With Disabilities’

Left suddenly and permanently paraplegic aged 14, Samanta Bullock dropped the sport she’d loved for half her life.

Growing up in a small town in South Brazil, she simply had no concept a form of tennis still existed for her.

It was only while working in local politics that a funding application from a wheelchair-tennis school fell on her desk – she was so disbelieving such a thing was possible she decided to investigate the school for possible fraud.

But when she showed up at what was, indeed, a wheelchair-tennis training school, and they asked her: “are you here to play?” – she couldn’t think of a non-awkward rebuttal. The rest is history. She became Brazil’s number one.

“Where did you find out about the existence of your sport?” We’d asked the world-class athletes who’d joined us in the Media Storm studio (figuratively-speaking, one Zoomed in from the Paris Paralympics).

“Through the blind people’s grapevine,” was his answer. “My mum accidentally sold a house to a visually impaired guy who was running a partially sighted football team in the late 90s.”

Until then, Keryn Seal had been playing alongside his full-sighted peers (“not very well”). He has since represented Great Britain 127 times, including the 2008 and 2012 Paralympic Games and three World Cups.

When Samanta came of athletic age, the Paralympics Games were not broadcast on her continent. Live coverage was exclusive to Europe, and even there, organisers had to pay networks to televise it.

If she’d seen wheelchair tennis in the media, she may have saved herself a 12-year hiatus over the most formative and athletic years of her life. Which is why Keryn – whose employer heads the Equal Play campaign seeking to reverse the exclusion of 75% of disabled kids from PE in UK schools – applauds Channel 4’s “fantastic” work in steering growing Paralympic viewing figures since London 2012.

This year’s tournament in Paris is the first in history at which all 22 sports will be broadcast somewhere in the world – including a record 160 nations, a steady uptick since London’s 115 in 2012.

Does this mean Keryn thinks we can hang up our coats? “It’s a very short answer, there’s still not enough coverage.”

There were 10 million tickets available for the Olympics – and only three million for the Paralympics, of which a third remained unsold by Wednesday’s opening ceremony.

What does it mean that the Paralympics will be broadcast on Channel 4, rather than our state broadcaster BBC, where back-to-back and primetime Olympics coverage takes place?

It can be argued that media coverage is proportional to the reduced public interest. But as we know from every Media Storm episode ever, the media often sets the narrative.

Neither of us writing know what it is like to be disabled. We also don’t know what it is like to be athletic. Being very much on the couch end of Couch-to-5k, we don’t watch the Olympics to get inspired to do a pole vault.

What the disparity in broadcast exposure reveals is less about relatability, and more about an underlying societal bias against people with disabilities.

Commendably, Channel 4’s 2024 Paralympic ad campaign takes ownership of the media’s role in steering perceptions, holding a mirror to the public for prejudicial perspectives of para athletes.

It follows in-house research that revealed 59% of viewers watched the Paralympic Games to “see athletes overcoming their disabilities” rather than “exciting sporting competition”.

Some of the slogans echoed in the constructively cringeworthy ad:

“She’s doing so well, considering…”

“He’s incredible for someone like that!”

“It’s so brave.”

Too cynical, according to critics; not cynical at all to those for whom these have been daily mantras of an athletic career. Keryn added one: “That’s pretty good, it gets you out of the house!” It put him off telling strangers what he does for a profession at all.

Condescension coloured the journalists’ questions faced by Samanta and Keryn during their athletic careers. “Within able-bodied sport, it is very much about this athlete’s journey,” said Keryn. “But when it comes to the Paralympic Games, suddenly there’s a fascination with disabled bodies and how that disabled person came to get their disability – is there a sexy story behind it? Is there a sad story behind it?” Samanta, who uses a wheelchair, faced these “all the time”.

“People focus on the accident. They want the drama, they want the blood, the pain.”

Writing sentence-one of this article, we were attuned to how many editors would seek clarification on what “accident” exactly left Samanta “paraplegic”. But Samanta was clear: “We need for people not to consume this kind of [media coverage], because the more you consume this, the more it’s what they are going to come after.”

Channel 4’s 2024 advert marks evolution since their 2012 and 2016 ‘Superhumans’ campaigns, which earned the moniker criticism for implying that there was something heroic about being disabled. But this is a question that divided our guests.

Keryn was part of that ‘Superhuman generation’. “At the time, I thought ‘this is quite cool!’ With Public Enemy doing the music for the advert – part of my elbow or kneecap was in one of those ads!”

Yet in spite of his limbinal complicity, he’s against it: “It was dangerous”. The ‘superhuman’ respect he was shown only extended his way when he wore the Paralympic tracksuit, which very few people living with disability ever get to do. A growth in anti-disabled hate crime after London 2012 made clear, the ‘Superhuman’ narrative served in part to expunge a society that respected disabled athletes as superhumans, from respecting disabled people as humans.

The difference, for Samanta, is that people with disabilities have to be superhuman whether they are an athlete or not. “I understood Channel 4’s point when they did that campaign. If we were to stay on the safe side, we would not leave home.”

We hardly need reminding, on a week when Tanni Grey-Thompson – a woman who won the London Wheelchair Marathon six times – had to crawl off a train due to lack of passenger assistance, that environments are often built exclusively for non-disabled people.

“This ‘superhuman’, it’s just a fact,” Samanta says. And it will remain one until society makes reasonable adjustments to accommodate all its members.

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Paralympics: an afterthought?’ is out now.