A sporting and popular success, the Games ended on Sunday. A momentum that must translate into real inclusion of disabled people in French society.
The weight of words… Remember, it was a month ago, the key word that accompanied the closing of the Olympic Games was that of parenthesis, often adorned with the adjective enchanted. Sunday, the Paralympic Games ended on the same cocktail of organizational success, popular enthusiasm or emotions in the face of extraordinary performances, with a French sporting record that was also in line with forecasts. And yet, the word parenthesis has almost disappeared from the enchanted comments describing the fortnight we have just experienced. From there to deduce that the Olympic Games were valuable for forgetting politics, and that the Paralympics were just as valuable for bringing us back to it, there is only one step. Because if the sporting magic, with its explosions of joy, its rivers of tears, the admiration for an exploit from elsewhere or the not always reasonable but what does it matter patriotic bias, has irrigated these Paralympic Games as it had done during the first half of August, the question of “and now” also immediately comes out of the hat.
And now, what will happen for people with disabilities? What will happen in sports federations to respond to the enthusiasm for sports practice generated by the Games, particularly among young people with disabilities? More generally, after this fortnight of inclusion in global television, what will happen to finally accelerate the investments needed to facilitate the accessibility of so many schools, so many public service premises, so many transport infrastructures, so many businesses… And since there has been much talk in recent days about the “change in society’s view” of disability that these Paralympic Games have enabled, let’s end with an allusion to these children’s eyes encountered in the Paris metro on Sunday morning. The young boy was going with his parents to the Olympic site at Bercy. Full of hope and desire, he jumped up and down impatiently on the platform. He had a slight disability. A question emerged in our wandering minds as soon as the doors were closed: what hopes, what impatiences will feed, in the days, weeks, months to come, the discussions in this family? Or in so many others?
