Realising your dreams

The Para Olympics has received far less coverage than the Olympics and given that there was doubt as to whether it would go ahead, the Brazilians having bankrupted themselves on the main games, it was touch and go. Now the results are coming in and GB are second to China in the medal table, just as they were second to the USA in the fully able bodied games.

The stories behind any athlete winning a gold medal are those of sustained dedication, hours of pain and exhaustion withdrawal from the normal things we do with our families, and all this, if you are fully able bodied. Imagine what it is like having been struck down by a disease, injured in an accident or born without certain limbs, the hurdles, both physical and mental are unimaginable to me who can hardly be bothered to walk to the shop. The courage to overcome some calamitous event which changed your life immeasurably is beyond the comprehension of most of us. And yet these brave courageous individuals get off their sick beds, out of their wheel chairs to compete at a standard you and I would be left floundering in their wake.
When the concept of having a Para Olympics was first tabled in 1960 I, and many others were sceptical. We thought it a sop to the disabled who were continually pressurising and presenting their plight and with the prejudice in those days they were often adjudged to be asking too much of society to make a 'level playing field' by providing wheelchair access to buildings, and the removal of obstructions for them to carry on their lives as if they were normal. Even the word normal drew some condemnation since to have only one arm or one leg didn't make you subnormal and rather the term disabled came to be used.
This country has taken the cause of the disabled to its humanitarian heart and events and training facilities have blossomed making us as a nation a leader since then. The success has been achieved by taking on board the debilitating effects of 'discrimination, both in our attitude to race, and gender matters generally and in this case, people who have lost the physical make up  we all take for granted.
The 100 metres has just been run as I write.  People with one leg, people with both lower limbs amputated, other abnormalities which categorised them as competitors all competed and a winner was the first past the finishing line but in fact they were all winners in this race, just getting here was an achievement. In some ways it's not for the squeamish watching people run and cope on artificial limbs, much like Oscar Pistorius, it has the element of freakishness in it as we watch these men and women, equipped with various appendages, compete with all their heart and soul.
As a nation we should be proud of these people but we should also be proud of ourselves, in not only encouraging them  but in making the 'where-with-all'  for them to realise their dreams.