Why You Should Watch The Paralympics

I have to admit I’m more excited about the Paralympics than I’ve ever been for the regular/normal/ordinary Olympics.

Maybe it’s because of the cool ad campaign for the Para’s –the Public Enemy track banging while the Paralympians look all surly on-screen, Murderball wheelchairs slamming into each other, and the blades that Oscar Pistorius runs on look a bit like alien legs, awesome.

Or maybe it’s because regular, normal and ordinary is a bit boring.

A while back I had a beer with a marathon runner. He had lost his leg in a motorbike accident and what would make most people shrivel up under the bedsheets and bemoan their potential invalidity didn’t stop him from sucking it up and just getting on with his life.

He told me that after running for tons of hours it was his ‘good’ leg that ached and gave him gyp. His lost limb, as you’d expect, didn’t give him any problems at all. He even mentioned that it would be a lot easier if he had two prosthetics instead of only the one.

Kind of casts doubt over the expression: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

According to all the sci-fi flicks we’ll soon be replacing our ears with mobile phones and iPods, exchanging our eyeballs for digital thingies that can upload holiday snaps to Facebook and zoom in like Superman’s, and chopping off our arms so they can be replaced with bionic ones. And when all this ramps up we’ll be jostling for mega-legs that run faster, jump higher and turn footballs into cannonballs.

A couple of years back the Olympic committee didn’t want SA’s Ozzie Pistorius to compete with the norms, saying his blades gave him an unfair advantage. So it only seems logical that in a few decades’ time it’ll be the Paralympians that break all the records.

But the Paralympics is about more than sporting achievement, and in my mind is more important than the regular/normal/ordinary/boring Olympics. The Paralympics has the power to inspire not just the disabled, but every one of us. In fact, it should make the rest of us feel shame for every time we gripe about the weather or our boss or anything for that matter.

The boring Olympics might highlight the physical triumphs of exceptional men and women, but the Paralympics does more – it showcases the triumphs of the spirit, and the strength of the soul.

No More Stormers

I’ve always felt lucky that, by pure accident of birth, I’ve had decent sport’s teams to support. Western Province and Stormers rugby. Cape Cobras cricket.

Even Cape Town Ajax is quite good – not that I really follow football, but anyway.

It’s always seemed bizarre to me when people from South Africa stoically support a team like Chelsea or Manchester United; and even more bizarre when someone from the UK supports a team from another city or county.

I could never support the Sharks, because I wasn’t born in Durban. And now residing in Plymouth I feel if I’m to follow any team it’d have to be a one from my newly adopted city.

Doing a bit of research on the Plymouth Albion rugby website in a stopover at Abu Dhabi, I read that their weekend home game was played to “a crowd of almost 3000 people” – smaller in scale than, say, Newlands rugby ground that often hosts around fifty thousand fans.

And it appears they’re not so hot when it comes to the game either, being third from the bottom of the Championship log the last time I checked. Although this was possibly because two of their players had been away playing for the Canadian squad sent to the World Cup.

If I were so inclined I could imagine myself as the newest member of this team. And I might be convinced to firmly believe that it’s not just tries and penalties that win rugby games, but screaming and shouting and flag waving too.

If not, I could at least believe that the more bums on stadium seats means more money to buy (or rent, really) better players, thereby improving performance.

It was a bit of a culture shock when I posited to Lucy that maybe we could pop down to our local and watch the next Albion game on the tellybox. She smiled warmly at my naïveté and said, “They don’t televise Albion matches.”

In South Africa they put even schoolboy games on Supersport.

So it seems I’ll have to burst my comfort bubble and venture into the wild. Go there, do that, get the t-shirt.

But with a Plymouth Albion jersey at a whopping fifty quid I’ll just have to make do with reports in the Herald.

Asleep At The Wheel

OAPs will tell you a mug of warm milk does the trick.

Hippies swear by meditation and thinking of the colour purple.

But I’ve found the most effective cure for insomnia is Formula 1 racing.

Aside from the repetitive round-and-round-we-go, listening to enthusiasts telling you it’s not the racing but the individual racers that are exciting – or something as nonsensical as that – should get you to pop off in no time.

It’s kind of like watching traffic except all the cars look the same and there’s no hooting or rude hand gestures. But these guys have got nothing on Cape Town drivers when it comes to speeding and dangerous overtaking.

Much hullabaloo was made of CT’s bid for our very own F1 track through the Waterfront and Greenpoint, but I think we could do better on our own.

Rather get minibus taxis involved. With gogos climbing on and off with their grocery bags, loud kwaito and toothless sidekicks shouting from the windows it’d be much more colourful and entertaining.

A separate division that ran at the same time could include emo art students on Vespa scooters overtaking on the left and stopping to buy a banky of ganja.

Add to all of that the guys selling Funny Money and bergies collecting coins for their bottle store fund standing in the middle of the road and I reckon we’d have a hit.

Of course, McLaren and Ferrari would have to start making kombis, but if Porsche can build a 4X4 then I don’t see the problem.

I wouldn’t mind the noise if it ran past my house. In fact, it’d make a change from the police sirens every morning. And the whiny engines would bring back memories of last year’s Fifa World Cup vuvuzela craze.

Even though the races would be as boring as ever, I think we could do with having some of the gees back in the city… and I could do with the beauty sleep.

Prime Slime

Maybe E-TV should just go ahead and change its name to WWE-TV.

No matter what time of the day, if you switch over to this channel, you’re sure to witness two guys pretending to beat the bejeezus out of each other. We all know it’s an act, and that no one really gets hurt, but we call it ‘sport’ and watch it anyway.

I’ll admit it makes for better daytime television than Days of our Lives reruns and infomercials for snail goo face packs, but the fact that it’s Prime Time viewing is a pretty pathetic reflection of public intellectualism.

Why is this American theatre on in a South African Prime Time slot anyway? Is the target audience for ETV really so undiscerning? Or do we as a nation like to unwind after a hard day’s slog by watching grown men slap and pull hair?

WWE Wrestling is kind of like a violent soap opera for boys. The men tend to spend more time scheming and insulting each other on-stage (or in-ring?) than actually fighting, and the costumes are so camp they could be rejects from the set of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

For decades parents have expressed concern about their children being exposed to such violence, but to my mind there is a lot more to be worried about if your kids idolise these artificial athletes.

I’d feel as though I’d neglected my duties as a responsible parent if one day my son asked for a t-shirt bearing the flexing bicep and growling mug of some bulging steroid case who dressed in tight luminous bicycle shorts and bickered like a menstruating fishwife with other, similarly-attired men.

Having your kids grow up to think all problems are solved through violence is one thing, but if they have to pop on a yellow one-piece and police-dog muzzle first, you know you’ve got problems.

With more of a sense of social responsibility, the SABC often televises boring ministerial debates during the day. And I’m sure the housewives and unemployable alcoholics who watch our politicians look down on those who choose the sweaty beefcakes.

But I suppose in Parliament the characters are as ridiculous, the arguments even more childish, and the eventual outcome just as pointless.

Soccer Saves The World

For me, when it comes to sports, size matters.

Aside from rugby, I don’t follow much, but when a World Cup comes along I stock up on flags and facepaint and embarrass myself.

I don’t even think the games matter much to me; I just like being in a large group that’s laughing and shouting and emoting. It’s so easy to find common ground with strangers.

After the Fifa World Cup last year a newspaper columnist commented that events like this in SA don’t show us how we are, they show us what we could be like.

There was none of the clichéd violent rivalry associated with soccer. What the World Cup did was make it easier to talk to those from different backgrounds and contrasting cultures. Not just internationally, but local ‘Others’ we South Africans know so little about, and associate so seldom with.

And even now, when the cricket is being played so far away, it still seems natural to talk to the guy at the table next to yours. But if you took away the sport on TV it wouldn’t happen.

Other events lack this dynamic. At the recent Cape Town Festival I felt none of the camaraderie and Oneness a major sporting event infects us with.

Why is this? What is it about two teams smacking, kicking or passing a ball around that brings us together? How does a game dissolve the fear we seem to have about interacting with strangers?

Is it because we now feel we have something in common with the ‘Other’? Of all the people I met over that amazing month in 2010, I found I had a lot in common with most, if not all, of them.

I wonder if we had more things like this – things that somehow made us forget our fear and randomly befriend strangers – I wonder if our ideas would shift to such an extent that the attitude would become natural.

It would be natural to just talk to anyone. And it would be natural to not look at someone randomly talking to us as weird or over-friendly. We could learn so much when it became natural to not just stick to our ‘group’.

Imagine a South Africa where the goal isn’t to find a common identity – something that makes us all the same – but to enjoy and find fascination in the amalgam of identities and differences within our nation.