It’s shaping up to be a busy catch-up day, and I’m still in recovery mode, so just a photo today. I haven’t reblogged photos as often lately, but I couldn’t resist this one.
From the fencing, man. fencing. Tumblr blog, via Just Rollin On.
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Monday, May 11, 2015
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Throwback Thursday
A year ago in Disability thinking … Winter Paralympics - Thursday, March 13.
That was just last year? I'm not sure I can wait another three years to see Wheelchair Curling again.
----------
----------
Friday, May 2, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Final Thoughts On The 2014 Paralympics
Alice Robb, The New Republic - March 17, 2014
I found this article in The New Republic fascinating. I think it is possible that the premise is true … that most disabled people either don’t care about the Paralympics or actively despise them. Unfortunately, the study cited to support the idea has a few problems:
1. It is British, so I wonder if Americans feel the same way.
2. It is based on a poll done in 2011, 3 years before these most recent Winter Paralympics, and a year before the last Summer Paralympics.
3. The survey was confined to “32 disability activists in the U.K.” Disability activists are always going to be disproportionately attuned to media stereotyping, and their general outlook probably isn't a good indicator of what disabled people in general find interesting or fun.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind any of this, and the results are interesting in any case. I wonder, though, whether the country and timing are keys to the findings.
In 2011, Britain was soaked in Olympics hype. And my understanding is that the U.K. media really hyped the rather dubious notion that the Paralympics would serve a social purpose … that they would change society’s attitude towards disabled people. If I was a disability activist inundated by such promises from the non-disabled media, I think I would be dismissive of the Paralympics, too. That doesn’t necessarily say much about the Paralympics themselves. As a sports event, they are hard to argue with. It’s when people try to make them mean something to the disability community that things get sketchy.
The survey respondents’ comments make sense to me as anticipated problems from three years ago. They expected coverage to be condescending. They worried that the athletes would be held up as “super crips”. I'm not sure about the 2012 Summer Paralympics, but I don’t think this is how the 2014 Winter Paralympics turned out. Personally, I found coverage of the Winter Paralympics in Sochi to be surprisingly light on mawkishness. As I wrote a few days ago, I think if anything, NBC and NBC Sports’ Paralympic coverage was less sentimental than its coverage of the Olympics.
I do give credit to the article’s author, Alice Robb on one point. The article is the only place I have seen a mainstream journalist refer to the “super crip” idea, or the notion that there might be something condescending about coverage of a disability sports event. These are real concerns that most people aren’t even aware of, and it’s good to have them raised here.
It seems to me, though, that the reason disabled people don’t watch the Paralympics is the same likely reason most people don’t watch … because we don’t know when they are on. The "regular" Olympics are on for hours at a stretch, day after day. You don’t have to plan your watching. Just turn on the TV at roughly the same times each day, and you’ll see the Olympic sports of some kind. With the Paralympics, you have to schedule your viewing. And if you forget for awhile, and tune in a half hour late for whatever event is on, you have missed half of the coverage for the whole day. I ended up watching less than half of the events I fully intended to watch, mainly due to getting involved in other activities, and just plain forgetfulness. If people had to plan their Olympics viewing to hit one-hour time slots in the early afternoons, their ratings would plummet.
That’s why I’m intrigued by one of the suggestions in this article … merging the Paralympics with the Olympics. It would probably be a logistical nightmare, but I love the idea of Paralympic events simply being added to the Olympic Games. I think it would raise interest in Paralympics sports overall. I wonder if it’s a serious idea under discussion?
No, disabled people aren’t all fanatical Paralympics fans. We don’t get all teary and feel super empowered watching sled hockey … no more than anyone else does watching a good hockey game. There are philosophical reasons to be skeptical of the whole thing. Yet, we do get a little bit of a thrill … just a spark maybe … seeing people we can identify with in a very specific way competing in an elite sporting event. That’s the crucial factor to me. The Paralympics don’t feel like a therapeutic activity with the formal trappings of high performance, competitive sports. The Paralympics are authentic sports, full stop. What I took away from the Winter Paralympics coverage is that while a few commentators tried to view them as some sort of rehab program, the athletes ensured that label just didn’t stick. What the U.S. and Russian sled hockey teams were doing out there was not an "activity", and the U.S. and Canadian teams were basically at war.
With better scheduling, I think the disability community could really embrace the Paralympics, come 2016 in Rio.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Another Rant On Positivity
Michael Rothman, ABC Good Morning America - March 17, 2014
Oh dear, oh dear.
“Only true disability is in our minds”. Not this again!
During the Winter Paralympics, Amy Purdy was one of the handful of highlighted athletes, and one of I think only two how had ads made around them and played in heavy rotation. She seemed pretty cool to me, and never said anything clichéd or superficial about being a double leg amputee snowboarder. The “feel good” aspect of her story as she told it was mainly her love of snowboarding, which caused her to keep asking doctors during her hospital stay, when she could snowboard again. That was a very individual thing about Amy Purdy, and not some non-specific brand of positivity extrapolated to all disabled people.
Which is why I was so disappointed to see this platitude attributed to her. So, I read the article, and I don’t see anywhere in it where Purdy actually says that the only true disability is in our minds. Mostly she says positive but grounded things I can’t argue with, including recognizing the fact that on “Dancing With The Stars”, she will be the novice and will have to learn from her partner. In the Duracell ad embedded in the article, she says, ""When disease took my legs, I eventually realized I didn't need them to lead a full, empowering life.” That’s quite a different thing to say and a lot more meaningful than, “The only true disability is in our minds”.
Did she say it or not? Or, was it something a headline writer had rattling around in his or her brain and just threw out there?
Why do I care?
First of all, it is simply not true. When you are a double leg amputee, it is not true that the only disability is in your mind. As I have written before, having a defeatist or lazy mindset can certainly be an additional disability, and a positive attitude may be a prerequisite to success, but missing two legs is a disability in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be a terrible thing, but it is a thing, not a state of mind. As I expect Amy Purdy would agree.
Second, this kind of dime store spirituality is a pet peeve of mine. On the one hand, it’s a meaningless platitude … well-meant and probably harmless. On the other hand, it connects with a very definite ideology that some find therapeutic, but I think does harm in the long run. This is the idea that actual, physical, concrete circumstances can be overcome by the proper mental attitude. No income and no job? Resolve that you deserve your dream job, think positively about it every day, and it will happen. Have a serious physical impairment? If you don’t think like a disabled person, then nothing can stand in your way.
The real harm comes with the converse. Disabled people who aren’t successful have their own attitude to blame. They've given up. They're too angry. They obsess over their condition and what they have lost. They use their disability as a "crutch". How ever it's phrased, it is the disability version of victim blaming.
Maybe this is a twisted way of reading a nice idea. Maybe it’s never intended to be a back-handed scold. Trust me, when you are disabled and faced with multiple intractable barriers, especially external ones, while a successful disabled person says that success is all about attitude, the message comes through loud and clear.
Again, attitude is important. It is a factor, and can either empower you or create additional problems for you. But perhaps more than any other “disadvantage”, disability does insist on itself. You can’t regrow a limb through determination. Spinal cords are not regenerated through daily affirmation. Disability exacts a price. For many of us, the price is manageable. For some, the price changes from day to day, month to month. For others, the price is very high, and it takes positivity, and adaptation, and cooperation, and a more just society to cope.
If Amy Purdy really said “The only true disability is in our minds", I hope at some point we can know the context. Among elite athletes, everyone has roughly equivalent physical gifts … even disabled athletes. In athletics, mental attitude really can make the difference between victory and defeat ... between a medal and anonymity. But that’s why disability sports are tremendously fun and exciting, but of limited teaching value in terms of most of our everyday lives. Snowboarding on two prosthetic legs is pretty amazing, but it requires a very different set of skills and personal qualities than landing a good job when you wheel into your interview. It is tempting to make comparisons, but we should be careful about it.
In the end, whether Purdy said this or not, the sad thing is that she said so many other great, insightful things that would have made much better headlines. It seems like most journalists have an unerring instinct for latching onto the most comforting, optimistic, simplistic things disabled people say. The fact that it often happens to be bullshit doesn’t seem to matter.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Winter Paralympics Results
And the top 3 countries are:
1. Russia
2. Germany
3. Canada
The United States came in 8th place.
This doesn’t quite convey the whole story, because Russia’s first place is by miles. They won 30 gold medals. The next highest, Germany, won only 9 golds, and on down from there. I don’t know much about the development of Paralympic sports, but the result does baffle me. Is it just because Russia could send more athletes tan anyone else, do the Russians devote more resources to Paralympic sports? It’s remarkable when you consider the fact that in 1980, when the Soviet Union hosted the Summer Olympics, they declined to host the Summer Paralympics as well. Was that a reflection of how Russians at that time viewed disabled people? Have disabled peoples’ status in Russian culture improved that much since?
And, for all our supposed leadership in disability matters, the US seems to have underperformed. Is this one of those instances where we just assume we’re ahead of the curve, only to find out that lots of other countries have quietly progressed further than us?
I will certainly be paying closer attention to the next Paralympics … the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Sled Hockey Final: USA 1 - Russia 0
Congratulations to Team USA! It was an exciting game. And props to the Russian team that won a Silver only 4 years after establishing a team. A few more notes:
- I suppose he’s too busy messing around with Crimea, but I think it’s kind of an insult that Vladimir Putin didn’t come, at least to the Medal Ceremony, and sent his deputy instead. I wonder if Putin harbors old-style disability prejudice?
- The Paralympic-related ads were all very good, but there were only like 3 or 4 different ones that have been running in very heavy rotation. For the next Paralympics, they need more sponsors to make more different ads.
- It’s excellent that in the Medal Ceremony, some of the guys are in their wheelchairs, some are still in their sleds, while others are standing … I presume they are amputees wearing prosthetics. It’s a nice reminder that wheelchair users aren’t the only disabled people. The play by play commentator also mentioned during the game that some players are amputees, some paraplegics, and some have lifelong conditions like spina bifida.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Winter Paralympics - March 15
Cross-Country Skiing - Live
3:30 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Sled Hockey Final
USA vs. Russia
1:00 PM Eastern
NBC
Wheelchair Curling Final
Final four teams are Great Britain, Russia, Canada, China
6:30 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Winter Paralympics - March 14
Snowboarding
3:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Paralympics Day 7 Coverage
11:30 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Paralympics Impressions
I watched a taped broadcast of the USA vs. Canada Semifinal Sled Hockey game today. It was fun. It was exciting. The USA won 3-0. They even showed some very brief highlights from other Winter Paralympic sports during the period breaks. All in all, I'm very impressed with NBC Sports Network's coverage. Even if I discount my "special" interest in the Paralympics, this is really better coverage than what we saw for the Winter Olympics.
Usually, media coverage of disabled people starts out empowering, and gradually backslides into sentimentality. It’s as if writers, actors, and commentators start out with good intentions, but can’t help themselves from falling back on the same old narratives, no matter who is being depicted.
With the Paralympics, it seems to go the opposite way. It feels like both announcers and the sponsors who write the accompanying ads featuring Paralympians, try at first to use the familiar sentimentality appeal. But they can't keep up the syrupy tone because the athletes are so capable, vibrant, and individual that they become full human beings despite efforts to pigeonhole them or make them faceless icons. Even when an ad series salutes Paralympic athletes for “defining themselves by what they can do, not what they can’t”, the actual athlete’s appearance and words are so inherently interesting and three dimensional that it becomes doubly clear how unnecessary that tired phrasing really is.
In fact, I would say that there is less sentimentality and cliché in the Winter Paralympics coverage than there was in the Winter Olympics last month. Maybe it’s because the athletes, themselves, steer things in a better direction. It is also possible that NBC Sports knows that the "tragedy to triumph" narratives they rely on to make the Olympics interesting to non-sports fans is problematic in a very particular way for disabled people. They still mention how each athlete became disabled, and when applicable, how getting involved in Paralympic sports helped them recover. But they seem to take care not to make these tearjerker stories. The stories come off instead as interesting and informative. We are left to decide on our own how and to what extent they are inspirational.
By the way, I never got the impression that any of the sled hockey players was "inspirational". They seem skilled, committed, and tough. The real narratives I picked up on were a bitter team rivalry between the USA and Canada, and the huge age range within Team USA ... from mid 30s to a 15 year old player who made two of the three goals.
In other words, the players' disabilities were the third most interesting things about them.
I'm anxious to see more!
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Thursday, March 13
Sled Hockey Semifinal (live)
5:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Sled Hockey Semifinal
Noon Eastern
NBC Sports Network
I confess, I haven't watched any of the Winter Paralympics since seeing the Opening Ceremony. I don't know why. Each day there's something available to watch during the waking hours. I've been blogging the event times for others. I guess each day I forget and because the broadcasts are too short, the event is usually over by the time I remember. I even missed the Wheelchair Curling this afternoon ... Wheelchair. F-ing. Curling!
I am determined to watch the Sled Hockey Semifinal tomorrow though. If that turns out to be fun, then I'll try to watch whenever I can until the games are over.
Meanwhile, here's a link to the medal standings so far. Briefly, Russia is in first place, Germany in second, Ukraine in third, Canada is in fourth, and the USA is in ... 13th place with 4 Silver and 4 Bronze medals.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Wednesday, March 12
Wheelchair Curling, USA vs. China (live)
1:30 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Paralympics Day 5 Coverage
3:00 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Monday, March 10, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Tuesday, March 11
Biathalon (live)
2:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Sled Hockey, Team US vs. Russia
3:00 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Oscar Pistorius: Which Kind Of Horrible Person Is He?
Associated Press - March 10, 2014
It has been a year and a few weeks since Oscar Pistorius was arrested for the alleged premeditated murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. The trial is finally fully underway, so we are hearing again about what was either a massively tragic accident, or a terrible, barbaric crime. I don’t have much to say that’s relevant to a disability blog, and only a few thoughts of any kind:
1. I am more persuaded than I was at first that it might really have been an accident. That Pistorius vomited in court on hearing the details of his girlfriend’s wounds doesn’t sound like the reaction of a deliberate murderer. In fact, his overall behavior in court seems exactly like how a person would react if they had accidentally killed their significant other in a bloody and gruesome way. I am not saying that I’d be ready to acquit him yet, but his story seems more plausible to me now than it did right after Steenkamp was killed.
2. If it was an “accident”, it certainly won’t be what anyone would call an “innocent mistake”. It seems like whatever else he is, Oscar Pistorius is a gun nut … and a reckless one at that. It sounds like he is exactly the kind of guy who loves to show off his newest firearm to friends, family, and maybe especially slightly horrified pretty women. Evidence mounts that Pistorius is the kind of guy who will act all reverent and masterly about his weapons, assuring people that they are perfectly harmless if you know what you’re doing … “See, it’s not loaded, here, I’ll show you …” BANG.
3. Also, I understand that South Africa has a lot of violent crime including “home invasions”, but what kind of siege mentality causes someone to fire multiple shots into a bathroom with a closed door, when you never actually saw who is on the other side … and you know your girlfriend is in the house with you?
So, unless he’s a cold-blooded murderer, or a man with a hair-trigger temper and a gun fetish, then he’s one of those massive assholes who mostly go through life doing no more damage than pissing people off, but who occasionally run into situations where their toxic obsessions, fears, and arrogance … plus the right weaponized tools … combine to produce life-taking and life-ruining results.
All of which probably has noting at all to do with his disability, or his athletic abilities. We say it all the time. Disability doesn’t make people noble or angelic. We come in all varieties, good, bad, and tragically stupid.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Monday, March 10
Alpine Skiing (Super G) (live)
2:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Paralympics Day 3 Coverage
12:00 Noon Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Sunday, March 9
Cross-Country Skiing (live)
1:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Paralympics Day 2 Coverage
11:00 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Friday, March 7, 2014
Winter Paralympics - Saturday, March 8
Alpine Skiing (live)
1:00 AM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Opening Ceremony (taped)
1:00 PM Eastern
NBC
Paralympics Day 1 Coverage
5:30 PM Eastern
NBC Sports Network
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Paralympian Jessica Long Goes Home
Credit where credit is due. NBC did a wonderful job with the profile of Paralympian Jessica Long, showing her visit with her biological parents in Siberia, Russia. The segment, which just aired, was beautifully done and made me cry. I’m not sure which affected me most, Jessica meeting her Mother, or meeting the now elderly women who ran the orphanage where she lived until she was adopted by American parents.
Jessica also had very meaningful things to say about understanding why her parents gave her up for adoption. They were under age, unmarried, and they felt ill-equipped to handle a child with disabilities. You could see the absolute mix of pain and joy on the Mother’s face when she saw her grown daughter Jessica. Parts of this this world are very harsh places, and people try their best to do what they feel is right. It’s great that Jessica Long got to tell her biological Mother that she understands, and that she loves her.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)