Pride, Preconceptions, and the Paralympics

The 2010 Paralympics inspired Canadians; maybe now they’ll inspire networks to provide proper coverage.

Fresh off the high of the Vancouver Olympics, my wife and I wanted to reconnect with those powerful feelings of pride and inspiration. Night after night, we looked for the kind of massive coverage CTV did so well in February, but this time for the Paralympics.

Apparently, such coverage was only available to subscribers of the more obscure sports channels. We saw only clips on the news. After a while, we gave up looking. The opening ceremonies were carried live in B.C. but not across the whole CTV network. Why not?

When Lauren Woolstencroft, Canada’s “golden girl,” went home this week, she received not a penny for her five gold medals – unlike the Olympic athletes who received $20,000 from the Government of Canada for each gold medal win. Why not?

What or who could be more inspiring than Ms. Woolstencroft? Born without limbs below the knee and no arm below her left elbow, she is a fierce competitor, driven to excel. This was obvious to her parents, who first put her on miniature skis at the age of four. But for some reason it wasn’t obvious to the sponsors and funders. Why not?

And even though the Canadian sledge hockey team lost a heartbreaking squeaker to the Japanese team – wasn’t it exciting?

The Paralympic athletes are elite in every sense of the word. Ironically, there are even some whose use of high-tech prostheses gives them advantages that mainstream athletes are calling unfair.

I suppose the answers lie in the fact that, until now, it had not occurred to most sponsors and funders that the Paralympics could achieve anything like the audiences and impact of the Olympics. And in fairness, Paralympic sports have more difficult rules and scoring calculations to compensate for different levels of athlete “disabilities” (it feels strange to use that word about these superbly talented, courageous, and heroic people). But the immense success of the 2010 Paralympics should – and I hope, will – represent a watershed moment in that thinking.

Every leader and manager should reflect on the lessons of these inspiring Paralympics. If people like Lauren Woolstencroft can muster the courage to become world-class competitive athletes, it doesn’t seem like much to ask that we should open our eyes to the magnificent possibilities in those around us. Imagine what we could achieve if we saw everyone’s potential instead of their limitations!

Organizations often hobble themselves with pre-conceived notions about what is – or isn’t – possible. Imagining a future of excellence and superb achievement – the way Ms. Woolstencroft’s parents did when she was a little girl – is within reach for each and every one of us. We should always remember that.

CTV realized during the Paralympics that the games had captured Canadians’ imaginations in a much bigger way than they had foreseen, and the network did end up broadcasting the closing ceremonies live across the whole country.

That’s progress. Next time, we should tell the sponsors and broadcasters that we want bigger, better coverage of the entire Paralympics. Those athletes deserve it, and so do we.