The Paralympics are now over too. It might have been a wet, gloomy summer in the UK, but it’s been a wonderful summer for the sports’ fan; not only hours of exciting viewing but the visibility of many of those who rarely receive media coverage, or even any coverage on television and the sports pages. I have the excuse that watching is work as the Olympics are a major part of the new Open University short Course,  This Sporting Planet, I chair. I would have watched anyway, but Beijing was spectacular in much more than the opening and closing ceremonies (although it’s probably best not to spend too long discussing the handover ceremony, with its somewhat bizarre condensation of Britishness). During the Olympics, viewers witnessed the visible presence of strong athletic women, there because they excel in their sports and not judged by criteria of sexualised aesthetics. (see the Women Sport Report). Not only were there more women taking part, but their representation and inclusion in the ‘Team GB’ Olympic story was positive and exhilarating. As Kira Cochrane optimistically put it in a Guardian article, these Games marked the transition from ‘Wags to winners’.

As Cochrane notes, we are more used to judging women by their physical appearance and dress than by their physical, competitive skills and prowess. The images kept on coming; Nicole Cooke, Rebecca Adlington, Joanne Jackson and Shanaze Reade, featured in the BBC Open University Olympic Dreams series, who will surely make it to the top in 2012. The Beijing Games, when ordinary women reached the heights, might have marked a significant shift from the representation of women as celebrities, wags or tragic figures in Reality TV, whose lives are in disarray to athletic high achievers. Visibility matters, but it is the form that visibility takes which matters most.

Disabled athletes enjoyed a presence on the screens and in the press during the Paralympics too. Cochrane notes this in a later article in which she celebrated the increased media coverage of the Paralympics in Beijing. The Games might not have been wall to wall but it was on prime time TV and it certainly generated a positive response from viewers. Media coverage of the Paralympics was sport specific and challenged the association between disability and victimhood, by showing high levels of achievement and sporting competence and the diversity and heterogeneity of the competitors.

So why are the athletes now invisible and why am I tired? It’s because the Games are over, the estimated 10 million disabled people in the UK are back in the closet, women are mostly off the sports pages and we are back to wall to wall football. Not that I don’t like football, but we have lost the diversity, variety and equity that marked the coverage of the Games. Do we have to wait another four years?

Also on Open2

Noel Thomas and Paul Shaw, two members of Britain's Olympic Wheelchair Rugby team, share their training secrets as part of our series of Olympic Dreams videos.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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