“The disturbing image of mental disability contrasts with that of para-athletes with motor disabilities, which is promoted by the media.”

LThe ambition to change the way people look at disability through the Paralympic Games would require that the images shown, which are a source of profit for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the media and sponsors, do not obscure a significant part of the population concerned.

However, for example, athletes with Down syndrome and those recognized as autistic without intellectual disabilities are not admitted to these Games. However, the French Federation of Adapted Sports (FFSA) welcomes them, and they participate in the Global Games, a real world championship organized by the international federation dedicated to them, within separate categories and alongside the one grouping together competitors with an intellectual disability.

Athletes who fall into one of three categories of disability: motor, visual and intellectual, can compete in the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. The latter, which is numerous in the population, is not very visible here: around 150 out of the 4,400 participants in these Games, six out of the 237 French people, for only three sports and 19 events out of 549.

Cheating by Spanish basketball players

This low attendance is often linked to the cheating of the Spanish basketball players, winners at the Sydney Games in 2000, but the majority of whom did not have an intellectual disability. As a result, the “mentally handicapped” athletes were hit with a collective punishment, since they were now going to be totally excluded from the upcoming Games.

Reinstated in the London Games in 2012, after the definition of tests certifying the existence of an intellectual disability that affects sports practice, they then had only a limited place. Indeed, the IOC sets a specific number of participants in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, such that in 2024 there could be no more than 4,400 athletes for the latter. So if we want to add a sport, an event or a category of athletes, we must remove some in order to respect the defined quota.

This is the quota argument that is put forward to refuse the creation of a specific category for athletes with Down’s syndrome, and also the one that was used by the director Artus on the occasion of his film, A little something extraHe spoke about this on May 11 on France Inter, regarding producers reluctant to get involved.

One of them, he reports, declares that he does not“don’t dare talk about this subject too much” and that the“We have already given all our budgets”. A similar refusal by luxury brands, who initially refused to lend evening wear to the film crew for the red carpet at Cannes. “They keep telling us stories about quotas”said Artus, referring to the justification provided: “We have already lent all our costumes.” He added that he did not believe this explanation.

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