A woman and her friend are sitting at a bus stop, watching Paralympic sport on a phone. “She’s doing so well, considering,” says the woman. There is a pause before her companion replies: “Considering what?”
This conversation is the gut-punch moment in Channel 4’s new trailer for the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. Like the rest of the advert, it’s designed to “turn the lens” on the viewer, Channel 4 says, after a survey it conducted found that more people watched the Paralympics to see people “overcome their disabilities” than to see elite sport.
The team behind the advert, comprising in-house Channel 4 creatives and the disability-focused communications consultancy Purple Goat, wanted to hammer home the message that Paralympic sport is just great sport – as entertaining as any other international fixture.
“We know from speaking to the community that any idea of athletes ‘overcoming disability’ is gross and problematic,” says Lynsey Atkin, the head of 4Creative, the channel’s in-house agency. “It ignores the fact that the problems and inequalities associated with disability are created by society. We felt that, actually, if anything should be overcome, it’s potentially the attitudes of the people watching.”
The advert is a noisy, gritty, in-your-face experience. It introduces us to three disabled athletes and their corresponding nemeses, forces which have been personified. The wheelchair rugby player Aaron Phipps goes up against gravity, the cyclist Sarah Storey takes on friction and the sprinter Emmanuel Oyinbo-Coker does battle with time. Wheelchair rugby players smash into each other, and the floor, at maximum velocity. Storey loses some skin to the tarmac. There is a line about your cat dying (it makes sense in context). There is none of the polite awkwardness or pity that normally surrounds disability, no shying away from the brutal physicality of Paralympic sport.
The advert demands that you ask yourself some tough questions. It features many patronising comments heard frequently by disabled people. “He’s incredible for someone like that,” a mum says to her family as they watch a wheelchair tennis player dominate the court. “He’s so brave,” a lad says to his friend, as they take in the atmosphere in the stadium.
Atkin describes these sorts of phrases – chosen because they encapsulate many of the attitudes highlighted by disabled people during the research phase – as “well-meaning bullshit” and the trailer makes clear that they should have no place in the Paralympics or anywhere. The audience is being asked: have you said or thought something like that about a disabled person? Why?
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The team behind the advert also acknowledges that this message repudiates the marketing associated with previous Games. The Channel 4 team accepts that the eye-catching “superhuman” branding of its 2012 and 2016 coverage was controversial, to say the least, and that many disabled people felt it did more harm than good. The moniker was criticised for focusing on athletes’ impairments, rather than sporting successes, and for implying that there was something heroic about being disabled. Some were disappointed that, with the much greater hype around the 2012 Games, the broadcaster had not taken the opportunity to challenge those tropes. But for Channel 4, it was important to generate hype in the first place.
Katie Jackson, Channel 4’s new chief marketing officer, says the 2012 superhumans campaign went a long way to redressing the idea that the Paralympics “were fundamentally a sideshow to the Olympics. That’s not my word, it was the language being used at the time.” The superhumans advert changed the narrative, she says: “Our campaign really caught fire and created a lot of conversation around the Paralympics.”
By the time of the 2020 Games (which due to Covid took place in Tokyo in 2021), they had decided to respond to criticism of the campaign. “We broke that concept down, by simply putting a full point in between the two words: ‘Super. Human.’ The idea was to remind people that the Paralympians themselves are not necessarily extraordinary. They are human like everybody else – and we should be celebrating their impressive athletic prowess for what it is.”
Gemma Stevenson is a former wheelchair tennis player who now covers disability sport as a journalist and lectures sports journalism students on disability coverage. She says the turning point came at Beijing 2008, when Paralympic sport was treated as equal to its Olympic counterpart, but that the media lagged behind, with the Paralympics still considered second-best.
Stevenson acknowledges that 2012 represented a huge shift in how seriously disability sport was treated, but she says the conversation around the Games wasn’t as revolutionary as many believed. According to research on how the Paralympics have been covered, “a lot of the narratives we use around disabled athletes actually stem from nearly 200 years ago”, she says. Indeed, the superhuman – or “super crip” – concept originated in freak shows.
“How we frame Paralympic narratives in media goes all the way back to the Victorians and this fantasy framing of disability. So I always question: why are we using a narrative from the 1800s and 1900s to frame disabled people now?” It seems that the team behind the new Channel 4 trailer asked itself the same thing.
It is just one advert, but Channel 4’s trailer does leave those old tropes far behind. We want to see how these athletes fare against gravity, friction and time – and we are rooting for them. This is no pity party; the advert demands that the audience confronts its biases. With its clever choice of phrasing, this confrontation will extend – maybe, hopefully – far beyond sport. If this sets the tone for the rest of Channel 4’s Paralympic coverage, we may finally be able to celebrate disabled people’s achievements. Considering what? Absolutely nothing.