The Paralympics is over but I won’t go back into my disability box

As our Paralympians return to the brutal reality of living in the Britain of Personal Independent Payments and workplace assessments, perhaps it is time one of them did a Colin Kaepernick

Great Britain’s Paralympians at the opening ceremony in Rio (Getty)

In the end they pulled it off. Despite a funding crisis, the closure of some venues, and advance ticket sales that would have shamed a moderately well supported team in the Vanarama National League, the Rio Paralympics produced some superlative sports, and a few notable milestones.

The highlight for me had to be the four athletes in the final of the T13 1500 metres, for visually impaired athletes, who all recorded times that were faster than that recorded by the winner of the Olympic 1,500 metre final a few weeks earlier.

The organisers even managed to rustle up some crowds, with a lot of people who might not have been able to afford the Olympics getting to see that the Paralympics can be every bit its equal. That has to be a good thing.

However, now the games are over, and the participants have arrived back home, I refuse to accept disability disappearing for another four years. I will not be put back into a disability box.

So here’s a short wish list of the things I’d like to see addressed before Tokyo takes on the job of putting on the 2020 event. None of them are all that hard to achieve. It just takes a willingness on the part of some of the various bodies I mention below to try.

Firstly, the visibility disabled people have enjoyed during the Games to continue. Disability needs to be normalised and accepted.

To achieve that, we need to see more disabled people on our screens, beyond the consistently good The Last Leg programme on Channel 4, and we need to hear them over the airwaves. Channel 4 and, I have to say BBC Radio if my experience is anything to go by, have been showing the way. I hope they keep it up and that others follow their example. Normalising disability – because it is normal and you’re only a road traffic accident away from it as I can testify – is one way to address and reduce the daily discrimination we disabled people unfortunately face. That means more disabled journalists doing what I do in the media, more roles for disabled actors, and yes, more disabled sport. The plethora of specialist sports channels – and I’m looking at you Sky and BT – have a lot of work to do in this regard. We live in a world we you can watch little league baseball on the latter, while GB’s appearances in wheelchair basketball tournaments appear only on YouTube if you can find them. That needs to change.

Which leads me into wish number two: for a Paralympian to do a Kaepernick at a major event.

By which I mean Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, who created a storm and sparked a much needed debate by refusing to stand for the US national anthem before games in protest against the shooting of black Americans by police. As my colleague Ian Herbert put it, sport can effect change if its participants make a stand. Back home some of this country’s Paralympians are likely to confront the brutal reality of living in the Britain of Personal Independent Payments and workplace assessments run by cynical contractors on behalf of a callous Government that treats disabled people with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. Paralympians need to remember the name of Freya Levy, who had trials for the women’s wheelchair basketball team before having to pull out amid the struggle to find a home. I know, I know, it’s tough when you might be running the risk of your funding being pulled for speaking out of turn, but sometimes that’s what you have to do to achieve change, and Paralympians have a unique platform that they should use. There will be an opportunity when the IPC Athletics World Championships come to London next year. How about it?

Meanwhile, outside of the sporting world: I wish for the Government to do something concrete to end the disability employment gap so more disabled people can get work.

Ministers keep saying they want to see it halved. They have done precisely nothing concrete towards achieving that aim. Despite record levels of employment in wider society, the disability employment gap remains where it was ten years ago. There’s been a lot of talk, we’ve had “Disability Confident” employment events, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Right now that pudding hasn’t even got as far as the oven. The Government can directly influence the public sector, and should do so by demanding public sector employers take hiring disabled people seriously and by holding their feet to the fire if they fail to do so. It can also spread its influence to the private sector by favouring contractors that do their bit. Once disabled people are more regularly seen in the workplace the prejudice against employing us that still exists might start to fall away.

Serious work also needs to take place on integrating the Olympics with the Paralympics. Because they should be.

The two sets of games should be integrated just as society should be integrated and it’s tiresome when the same old excuses keep getting trotted out for not doing anything. It isn’t logistics and the planning challenge of running the games together that are preventing it from happening. It’s simply down to a lack of will. On that note it’s heartening to see Los Angeles having appointed former wheelchair racer Candace Cable as vice chair of the city’s bid for the 2024 games. She has admitted that America has work to do when it comes to rising awareness of para-sport and has pledged to “bring these [Paralympic] Games to the forefront”. It’s a good start.

Finally, there needs to be more effort put into grassroots para-sport.

It is everyone’s right to be able to play a sport and be rubbish at it. Unfortunately disabled people often need pricey specialist equipment to do that. My basketball chair cost more than £3000 and I can’t find a club in London. Some 36 per cent of Britons participate in sport, and that could do with being higher. That falls to 18 per cent amongst those of us with disabilities. If you want to find the super humans of the future, you need places for disabled humans to play so they can be spotted and brought through the system. But it goes beyond that. Playing sport is good for people with disabilities just as it is good for the able bodied. We need more chances to compete.