The Paralympic Games shine a spotlight on different disciplines whose equipment is often very expensive for athletes and sometimes inaccessible for amateurs.
After the success of the Olympic Games, the craze continues with the Paralympic Games, which end on Sunday. Between the approximately 2 million tickets sold and the record-breaking television audiences for the Paralympics, many French people are discovering disciplines that receive little media coverage the rest of the year. And this showcase for disabled sports can spark the interest of some people with disabilities who want to take up a sporting activity.
But behind the 4,400 Paralympic athletes competing in Paris are particularly significant investments, particularly on the financial level. Indeed, the equipment can vary significantly from one athlete to another depending on their discipline of course, but also on the nature and degree of their disability or even physical and morphological characteristics.
“More than one piece of equipment per discipline, it’s almost one piece of equipment per athlete in reality,” says Charles Henry, marketing manager at Ottobock.
This company, which is responsible for the repair shop for athletes’ equipment in the Paralympic Village, offers several solutions to disabled sports enthusiasts, ranging from sports blades to prosthetics and orthotics, including wheelchairs. Charles Henry uses this last example to illustrate the variety of variations that can occur on a single type of equipment: “Almost all the wheelchairs are different, between those for sprinting, which have three wheels, those for wheelchair rugby, which are designed to withstand significant impacts, those for wheelchair basketball, which must be more ‘open’ to make it easier to take shots, or those for wheelchair tennis, which must be particularly mobile, if only for serves.”
Five-figure sums for the competition
To ensure the athlete’s performance, the equipment must be custom-made and therefore requires a lot of adjustments, which increases the bill. For example, an “active wheelchair” has an average price of 8,000 euros, but this price hides huge disparities. Thus, a beginner’s multi-sport wheelchair can cost around 1,000 euros, but the bill can quickly exceed 10,000 euros for a device intended for competitive wheelchair basketball or wheelchair rugby with a starting price of 5,000 euros. Five-figure sums are also easily reached for competition prostheses for jumping or running, from 15,000 to 30,000 euros. In the case of a femoral prosthesis equipped with a carbon blade, the cost of changing the blade every 15 months of around 3,000 euros must be added to the 20,000 euros.
While top athletes can benefit from financial support from sponsors or their club to reduce the remaining costs, this is not the case for amateurs who represent a niche market that major sports equipment manufacturers have not yet taken over.
“We won’t see Nike or Adidas getting involved tomorrow because the disabled population is too young to be able to practice a sport, meaning the market is small,” says Charles Henry, who calls for promoting this public’s ability to access sport and the provision of equipment.
“As the equipment is sold on a small scale, the research and development costs are high and therefore the prices are high.”
Decathlon, a rare major player to invest in the market
To date, Decathlon is the only major sports equipment manufacturer to have fully invested in what is still a niche market. After a pilot project in Italy between 2016 and 2018, the brand has been offering a range of products for people with disabilities for two years at more accessible prices. The price of the chairs varies between 2,000 and 3,000 euros depending on the discipline (athletics, basketball, fencing, handbike and racket sports) while the leg straps are sold for around sixty euros. Easy-to-put-on sweatpants and jackets are priced at 50 euros. The blind football kit including ball and blackout mask is sold for 55 euros.
In France, the French Handisport Federation and the French Adapted Sports Federation have over 80,000 licenses. According to the survey on physical and sporting practices conducted by the National Institute of Youth and Popular Education (INJEP) at the beginning of the decade, 32% of disabled people aged 15 or over practice sport regularly and 47% at least once in the last twelve months.
