![]() ![]() “We’ve arrived,” Jessica Long, a swimmer who has won 13 gold medals and will be competing in her fifth Paralympics, told The New York Times when the name change was announced in 2019. Included will be the first prime-time coverage of the Paralympics on the main NBC channel, four hours spread over three highlight shows.Īnd in another nod to the elevation of adaptive sports for people with impairments, the U.S. NBCUniversal, the longtime Olympic and Paralympic network in the United States, has committed to 1,200 hours of coverage on its television channels and streaming platforms, after it presented only 70 hours from Brazil in 2016 and five and a half from the London Games in 2012. That availability has been abetted to some degree by the International Paralympic Committee’s decision to waive its rights fees in dozens of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and to help produce coverage for broadcasters there. Paralympic medalists, who used to receive one-fifth of what their Olympic counterparts got ($37,500 for a gold medal, $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze), and an expansion of coverage by television and streaming services. Significant changes over the past five years include parity in prize money for U.S. People are hearing it like no other time.” “People know what it is now,” Hunter said as she prepared to leave for her third Games. In the past, she routinely had to explain what the Paralympics, and her team’s 2016 gold medal, meant. ![]() ![]() Like the thousands of Olympians who competed here weeks ago, the Paralympians will take to fields, courts and courses a year late, without spectators and under a threat of contagion that, at least by the measure of television ratings, has dimmed so many other major sporting events over the past year and a half.ĭarlene Hunter, a wheelchair basketball player for the United States who teaches classes on disability issues at the University of Texas at Arlington, said recently that over the five years since the last Summer Paralympics, in Rio de Janeiro, she had seen a soaring interest in the Games and a better understanding of them. Months later, those three athletes - Sophia Herzog, Mallory Weggemann and Aled Sion Davies - have joined about 4,400 other competitors in Tokyo for the 16th Summer Paralympic Games, which open on Tuesday. It was the closest she could come to propelling herself through water.Īnd in Cardiff, Wales, a shot-put champion improvised by stringing a cargo net between apple and pear trees so he could safely practice in the yard of his new home. TOKYO - One Paralympic swimmer ended up training in the chilly Arkansas River for a while after the coronavirus pandemic cut off her access to a pool.Īnother borrowed a swim bench, set it up in her garage in Minnesota and simulated her strokes against the resistance of a pulley system. ![]()
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