An accessible rostrum for athletes with disabilities

Some changes in public attitudes sneak up upon us. One day we look up and find that the world has changed in a subtle but important way. The opening of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester is one such moment. Only a few years ago it would have been derided as political correctness gone mad to have athletes with disabilities taking part alongside the able-bodied in one of the main international competitions. To have them taking their places on the same rostrum as the able-bodied competitors to receive medals that are formally counted towards their country's total would have been mocked as loony-leftism.

Yet the news of the arrangements for the next 10 days has provoked no such reaction. After the success of the paralympic events at the Sydney Olympic Games two years ago, the innovations at Manchester have been accepted as a natural progression. They are a way of better recognising the efforts and achievements of people who would in the past be thought to have had nothing to contribute to an event that celebrates physicality. The theme of inclusiveness is often just a rhetorical device, but here it means something.

This is not only about the self-image of people with disabilities, who will see themselves reflected in sport in the same way the able-bodied see themselves, but about how they are seen by the able-bodied. Discrimination against the disabled is still common in Britain – to an extent that would be unacceptable if borne by any other minority – but it often occurs as the result of assumptions that can be shifted if challenged.

For many people with disabilities, the most frustrating obstacle to challenging those assumptions is the fact that they are so often invisible as people. They are excluded from everyday life, and therefore from a meaningful equality, by things the able-bodied do not notice.

The Manchester Commonwealth Games change all that. There is nothing more challenging to the idea of physical disability than to take part in sports. Employers, and everyone else, should take note. The games are a powerful blow for the idea that everyone can make a contribution on their own terms.