Twice this week, I've witnessed senior British television journalists embarrass themselves on air when dealing with Paralympians or Paralympic issues. The first was Rob Bonnet, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, interviewing Oscar Pistorius with a line of moral questioning more akin to the way a Prime Minister should be interviewed over a political scandal.
The 'Today' programme should reserve its holier-than-though moral tone for graver, fundamental global issues – not for a 24-year-old athlete who had both legs amputated at 11 months old and has already proven through a legal process that he is entitled to run. They got his age wrong. They also called Baroness Tanni-Grey Thompson, 'Dame'.
FACTS: Pistorius went through a legal process four years ago with the Court of Arbitration in Sport which said he had no advantage, and thus his IAAF ban was overturned. And this is important: Pistorius runs on the same blades, created in 2004, which were subject to scientific testing for the Court of Arbitration in sport. Secondly, the technology used with the blades has been around since 1996, and is still used. Pistorius is not using scientific advancements to get quicker. As a person, he is training harder, has lost 7kgs in weight, and has not had a major injury for a year.
And here's another thing which the BBC and Bonnet cut out of their pre-recorded interview with Pistorius. Bonnet asked Pistorius why he didn't use his normal day legs. Pistorius's reply to Bonnet ? '"Do you ask Usain Bolt to run in Dr Martens?"
The second gaffe this week involved Channel 4 anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy on the Channel 4 news on Thursday evening, in Trafalgar Square, after a day of Paralympic sports being demonstrated beneath Nelson's Column.
Guru-Murthy ended up digging a hole for himself by failing to grasp the issues Paralympians face, and being cut across by Lord Coe and Sir Phillip Craven, president of the International Paralympc Committee, for his slant on 'disability' and 'disabled'. The pair were clearly exasperated with him.
These two examples are to serve a point. The Paralympics, the Paralympic Games, the Paralympic Movement, are all complex.
The attention-grabbing in-studio issues for Channel 4's sports presentation which arose from the station's broadcasting of the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Daegu have raised a pressing issue for the Paralympic Games next year.
Whither the anchors to provide the nuts and bolts – arguably the most important dressing – for 150 hours of broadcast coverage from Channel 4. They won the tender to be host broadcasters, the first time it has ever gone out to tender, and they now have the task of presenting the Games. It will not be easy. I speak from the standpoint of London being the fifth Paralympic Games cycle I've covered for the Telegraph.
Causing offence is very easily done. There is an etiquette to dealing with all things Paralympic, both linguistically and semantically. Many will be unaware that London is the fourteenth staging of the Paralympic Games, and in that time, the paralympic movement has developed a highly sophisticated political, cultural and social awareness.
Many media outlets, inexperienced at covering the sports, will present the event, and already have been, almost as if it is new. Certain things are anathema: like the word 'brave'. Obvious, really. Or even 'disabled'. Really, you might be saying ? But yes, 'disabled' isn't a word which goes down too well.
I pushed hard with the Telegraph sport desk to have 'disability sport' changed to 'paralympic sport' a few years ago. I believed it needed to be done. Disability is a word paralympic athletes associate with stigma and stereotype.
Be careful what you say around Paralympians, until you grasp what the movement is all about. My take – rightly or wrongly – is that the paralympic movement has a clear duality: it is about elite sport, of course, about people at the forefront of their own physicality, but equally, it is as much about creating awareness of what is actually not disability.
Within the linguistic confines of talking about paralympic sport, athletes can often tell whether people have pre-conceived prejudice, or just plain ignorance.
I could go on. It is complex. But back to Channel 4. They have a monumental task ahead of them. Rick Edwards, the ubiquitous Channel 4 geezer, took over when matters went awry in Daegu and made a pretty good fist of it in the studio.
Edwards works well in conjunction with Ade Adepitan and Iwan Thomas on 'That Paralympic Show', as a trio of intrepid, and colourful characters taking us through the complex web around paralympic sport, with its five different disability groups, and a classification system which must be confusing to the uninitiated.
But a weekly magazine show is entirely different in genre to the live studio coverage at a major event. Channel 4, who are also in the process of training a group of young presenters with impairments, which is laudable in itself, should be looking to the safest possible pair of experienced hands for this role.
My tuppenceworth ? Steve Rider. Versatile, not prone to cock-ups, and thoroughly rounded as a human being. Rider began the Rugby World Cup coverage with ITV this morning, and there is a cool, calm assurance with which he takes the viewer away from the field to the studio.
Channel 4 needs to get this right. Sooner rather than later. The young presenters will be fun, Ade Adepitan and the geezers will do just fine, but for my money, the Games will rise and fall on the analysis in studio. Thus, a steady hand at the tiller, and a group of analysts who know what they are looking at, and how to get this across to a largely mainstream audience who have no knowledge of disability issues, will be key to whether it 'works' or not.
This is a mainstream sports event – with a difference. Big challenge to get right.
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