The paraplegic champions

Subject: The paraplegic champions.

As the paraplegic games in Tokyo draws to a close the UK has done tremendously well coming second to China. It could be argued that fielding so many talented paraplegic athletes speaks volumes for our attitude to disablement and our encouragement for disabled people to live a normal life.

There are nations who cast aside the disabled as being a burden, demanding facilities to make their lives easier and to this end years ago I questioned the installation of a lift specifically for the disabled, not for staff who already worked for the company but in case any applied for a job!!

Lifts are horrendously expensive and I didn't think it economically sensible to make such a provision.

Ramps onto pavements, special drop down steps on the tube and on buses and secure places for wheel chairs inside the vehicles are a boon as are disabled toilets.  It's costly but it recognises that as a community, we function as one and to be born with or suffer a disability is a chore enough not to have any more hurdles than necessary.

The clubs and the associations for the disabled are many and the term disabled is a misnomer when you see the Herculean strides these people have made to compete. This is not the fathers egg and spoon race on the village common this is serious athletics not a mile away from what an able bodied athlete would produce. The hours of physical torment trying to recover mobility is enough if you have your limbs in working order but without a leg or without both legs the mind boggles. I watched what appeared to be a football game only to learn  that all the players were blind and relied on some sort of sensor to give them a sense of their surroundings. I would be a wimp sitting in my arm chair, these guys are competing on a world stage.

So when you see someone battling in a wheelchair to get over a step or a blind person hesitant to cross the road, stop what your doing, stop the frenetic pace to be somewhere else and take time out to help, they might not be Olympic champions but they deserve our respect.