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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Oscar Pistorius, the 21 year old, white South African double amputee sprinter, who lost both legs below the knees when he was a baby and runs on shock absorbing carbon fibre prosthetics, has won the right to be eligible to compete at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Pistorius be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes. He has competed in two able-bodied athletics meetings in 2007, but the International Association of Athletics Federations, the IAAF, ruled in January 2008 that his prosthetics qualified as technical aids, which are banned in IAAF-governed sports because they were seen to afford an unfair advantage to the athlete.

What is seen as unfair here is the advantage of an athlete with a disability over those who are classified as able-bodied. This is an unusual reversal of the more familiar media discourse of disability which constructs disabled athletes as vulnerable victims, albeit ‘victims’ who are courageous in defying the physical disadvantages they have experienced. The language through which the debate is constituted also invokes science fiction. has been re-named Blade Runner and, although there is limited discussion of the enabling possibilities of cyborgs, it is the promise of cyborgification which underpins the more positive take on Pistorius’s own achievements and the hope that his experience might offer other athletes with disabilities. Technology and ethics elide in a debate about the use of prosthetic blades described as the ‘Cheetah flex-foot’; not only fast but it sounds like cheating. It was technoscience that the IAAF deployed to assess the limbs with a team of scientists used high-speed cameras, special equipment to measure ground-reaction forces, and a three-dimensional scanner to record body mass, prior to the IAAF decision to exclude Pistorius in Lausanne in 2007. On the one hand the interventions of technology might afford unfair advantage, but on the other science provides the measure by which fair standards are judged and maintained.

Don Riddell of CNN described the 2008 ruling in Pistorius' favour as "groundbreaking but his success might devalue the Paralympics bodied Olympics, asking ‘Does it cheapen the Paralympic Games?’ Some of those commenting of the BBC Sport 606 website are more realistic, asking if spikes will be banned next. What is however, most interesting about Pistorius’s experience is the challenge it offers to the parameters of the natural body and to what might be legitimate means of increasing body competences and achievements in sport and how and who judges what we can do and what we can’t.

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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Every now and again you read a news report in the media which connects with real life in the most profound ways. You may have read some of the increased media coverage about the black steel band ejected from a budget airline because someone thought they were terrorists. They have become known as the Talipan.

In the first week in February it made all sorts of connections when I read about the black steel band led by a blind calypso musician who won damages against one of our leading budget airlines for ejecting them from a flight from Sardinia because a British psychology lecturer on holiday with his family complained he thought they were terrorists. It spoke volumes about the way post 9/11 hysteria can impinge on human rights. It touched on the power of casual racism and intolerance to shape human action. It said much about the treatment of people with a disability. It showed how mere suspicion, however groundless, can have grave ramifications and how regulations can often make situations far worse than they are.

I was partly drawn to the case because I too am a regular visitor to Sardinia and have used the same airline on numerous occasions, flying in and out of Alghero.

The incident happened on New Year's Eve 2006. After performing to critical acclaim on the island the London based Caribbean Steel International Orchestra, whose four members were the only black passengers onboard , were escorted off a Stansted bound plane at gunpoint after the lecturer threatened to remove his family from the plane if the pilot did not insist upon the band's removal. The band's leader is believed to be the only blind tenor pan player performing in the world today.

The band had sat together in the terminal building, a fact that had been noted by the suspicious passenger. He grew alarmed when he saw band members sit separately by the windows. on the plane (they had pre-booked priority window seats on the flight which resulted in them sitting apart). Following the complaint that he thought they were terorists the crew evicted the five musicians from the plane and they were escorted to the airport building for interrogation by the armed Sardinian authorities.

[Photograph taken by Soon. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.]

The university lecturer had also complained to the stewards that the blind band leader, who was wearing dark glasses, was behaving suspiciously. The lecturer thought he was 'reading a newspaper'. The band leader had sat next to a passenger reading a newspaper and, being an avid football supporter, had asked him to read out the football scores for him. As he did so the leaders' glasses appeared to scour the result page in the passenger's newspaper.

After a 20 minute delay while their identities were checked by the Italian authorities the band were given permission to rejoin their flight home. However, the captain refused access even though the band’s leader had his disability card inspected and his sightless eyes verified. He had lost his sight in 1983 after a cataract operation failed.

In court the budget airline claimed the captain had taken the 'safety first option' after he noted 'tension' on the flight because of the incident.  After promptings from the band's MP the budget airline offered the band members £100 each and vouchers for their flights home, but no apology. Although the band were allowed to leave the island on New Year's Day they had to fly to Liverpool instead of Stansted forcing an uncomfortable overnight stay because they missed their London bus connection and could not find a hotel room that early in the morning. The band were forced to spend a very cold and wet New Years Day night in a kebab shop and then a bus shelter before the bus station opened and they could return to London. They arrived home two days later than they had intended and missed spending the New year with their families.

Each member was awarded £800 compensation, in addition to the extra costs each incurred of £190.  In his written judgment District Judge Southcombe told the City of London county court the captain had 'ample time' to reassess the situation once the Italian authorities had checked each band member's identity and papers. 'Just because a passenger was black or someone did not like the look of him or her, it was not acceptable to offload that passsenger', he explained.

Judge Southcombe concluded that the band's ‘embarrassment at being the only black persons removed from the aircraft at gunpoint for no reason, their inability to be with their families and friends on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the overnight stay in the cold in Liverpool have to be taken into account’. The sum awarded, he declared, reflected the ‘extreme situation’ the band found themselves in. The psychology lecturer did not in fact give evidence in court.  Various media reports suggested that he was in fact a professor of psychology.

The budget airline is appealing against the verdict while the band members have called for an investigation into the incident by the Civil Air Authority. The budget airline has still steadfastly refused to offer the band a full apology. It commented: 'while we sincerely regret the inconvenience they suffered, our crew were absolutely right to prioritise passenger safety/ security at all times'.

The story begs many questions. Would the incident have happened if the band had sat together on the plane? Would the incident have happened if the band's members were all white? Would the lecturer's suspicions have been aroused if the band leader was of normal sight?  Why did the reported 'tension' spread so rapidly among the passengers? Was the reaction of the captain excessive? Why, once the band member's papers had been checked, were they not allowed back on the flight when it was clear they were talented musicians returning home from a successful tour of Sardinia? And why were the budget airline's regulations followed with such prejudice when it was clear that there was in fact no danger to the plane, or the occupants?

Some might argue that such extreme situations are justified in the post 9/11 context, that the captain had no alternative but to deny the band access even after the Italian authorities had checked all the documentation.

But consider this. What if the band members were in fact terrorists but white skinned and their leader able-bodied? It would be highly unlikely that they would have been stopped. The lecturer’s suspicions would not have been so aroused.

As Roosevelt once observed in the last century in another decade noted for its paranoia, quite often there is 'nothing to fear except fear itself’. Indeed, one might argue that exhibiting racist behaviour on an airplane could itself, if taken to extremes, be prejudicial to the safety of the occupants. It is also outrageous that, not for the first time, the budget airline concerned showed such scant regard towards a passenger with a disability.

And the final irony? Guess who is playing at the opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow in March. Yes, you guessed it. The Caribbean Steel International Orchestra!

I doubt if the budget airline will dare show its face, do you?

For a revealing interview with two of the members of the Caribbean Steel International Orchestra see Grounded from guardian.co.uk.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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