Plastered on the walls of every Métro station in Paris this week are adverts boasting some boundary-pushing Franglais. Alongside images of Paralympic athletes running, leaping and wheeling is a slogan directed at residents of the French capital. It reads: “Game [is not] over”.
For those unfamiliar with 1980s video arcade jargon, “game over” was the message that heralded the moment a machine ate your money. The grammatically tortuous “is not” has been overlaid by organisers of Paris 2024 to remind locals that the summer of sporting excellence will continue. The Paralympic Games begin on Wednesday night, and every Parisian is welcome.
After months of anxiety over low ticket sales and concerns over whether a French audience would embrace disability sport, the news in recent days has been good. More than 2m tickets have now been sold, out of 2.5m, with a number of events sold out. The Île de France regional government has announced an ambition to make the Paris Métro accessible to wheelchair users at last, one of the abiding concerns around the Games.
And on Wednesday night comes an opening ceremony that will once again take place in the heart of the city and organisers say it will act as a “gigantic hug” to the 44,000 athletes competing over the following 11 days.
Starting on the Champs Élysées, the opening parade will move along “the world’s most beautiful avenue” before a more traditional ceremony takes place in the open air at the Place de la Concorde. Continuing Paris’s key theme of being open to everyone, organisers say they want to extend the general message of welcome and inclusion to one specific to people with disabilities.
According to the president of Paris 2024, Tony Estanguet: “This ceremony at the heart of the city is a strong symbol illustrating our ambition … to position the issue of inclusion for people with disabilities at the heart of our society.”
The president of the International Paralympic Committee, Andrew Parsons, promises an incredible ceremony. “I like the French expression ‘the party continues’ and tomorrow’s opening ceremony is going to be fantastic, it’s going to be incredible, no doubt,” he said.
“The concept was always that [by staging the event] in the Champs Élysées and the Place de la Concorde it’s like the city’s embracing the Paralympic athletes, the Paralympic movement. We are seeing it as a gigantic hug for our athletes and this cannot be more positive.”
Estanguet emphasises that the job of engaging French and Parisian people with disability sport has been ongoing. Official estimates predict 300,000 visitors for the Games, about half the number that travelled for the Olympics. Engaging locals becomes more important as a result, especially in helping to fill out the 80,000-capacity Stade de France, which will once again play host to the track and field programme. An uptick in ticket sales means organisers are now working to create extra space at the Eiffel Tower arena and the Château de Versailles, with events at seven locations now sold out.
“What made a success of the Olympics was the atmosphere,” Estanguet said. “The fans sang the Marseillaise more than ever before and this is the fruit of work we did to have a square at each venue which held very proactive supporters. We found it worked very well and we will do exactly same thing in the Paralympic Games.”
Some local scepticism remains, particularly with the Games coinciding with the end of The Holidays and the return to school. But Estanguet says the scheduling is deliberate. “We decided on purpose to position the games during back to school in France because we want to take advantage of the opportunities it offers,” he said. “Back to school is a good time to send messages to students, to show inclusion and accessibility, to provide an opportunity for education.
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“I believe French people are going to be able to make a difference, to make these Paralympics their own. We went beyond what we dreamed of with the Olympics, creating a true fervour, and I believe it’s going to be the case with the Paralympics as well.”
Another reason for optimism is that exhilarating elite sport is guaranteed. New fans will be introduced to compelling events unique to disability sport, the pace and aggression of wheelchair rugby and the precision and strategy of boccia, for example. They will also come to the various arenas at a time when performance in parasport is improving almost exponentially. There will be a record number of countries in competition, 182, and as Parsons put it, “world records are going to be smashed”.
ParalympicsGB hope to match the a towering performance in Tokyo three years ago. Finishing second in the medal table and winning 124 medals overall, it was one of the best British performances at a Paralympics, especially given the challenges of Covid. With a target of 100 to 140 medals this time, and with 215 athletes and guides in the team, ParalympicsGB will be intent on maintaining the record of never finishing outside the top five nations.
On Tuesday, Terry Bywater and Lucy Shukur were announced as the British flag bearers for the opening ceremony. Shukur, a wheelchair tennis athlete, will be competing at her fifth Games, while Terry Bywater will be adding to six previous appearances in wheelchair basketball. “I feel quite emotional,” said Bywater. “This is my seventh Games, I actually wear the No 7 vest too – so this is all a bit crazy right now. I’m just super-, super-proud.
“This is not just about me, this is for the 215 athletes that are here, all the staff, my family, my wife, my son, my family that have passed away that always followed me – I’ll be doing it for everyone.”
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