Gillingham on the Paralympics

OVER the years I have listened to some prominent, well-informed and entirely reasonable people pass brutal, if private, judgments on the Paralympics.

Their criticisms have been varied; viewpoints like, the games are not good television; that they're uncompetitive and provide inflated British medal counts that serve to devalue the currency of medals won at the able-bodied equivalent.

Wherever your sympathies lie it must have been hard not to sigh after reading some of the stories that have come out of Beijing this past week. For starters, there's the news that athletes are spending as much as £3,000 on special go-faster, carbon fibre wheelchairs while Britain's gold medal-winning cyclist Jody Cundy peddled to glory with the assistance of an aero-dynamically enhanced artificial leg. There have been positive drugs tests including from a German wheelchair basketball player who claimed his test failure was caused by treatment for hair loss.

The disabled sporting community will, of course, say that they are only following the example set by the able-bodied. And, of course, they are right.

But that doesn't make it right does it?

I assume, perhaps naively, that Paralympians should participate according to a higher moral and ethical Olympic spirit. If ever there was an event where the taking part really should be more important the winning, isn't this it?

And what of the controversies thrown up by the seven-a-side football where teams from Russia and Ukraine who participated in the cerebral palsy class – Ukraine winning yesterday's final 2-1 after extra-time – whose skills have been compared to professional teams.

Four nations wrote letters of protest early in the competition claiming the Russians weren't disabled and shouldn't be there.

The rumours that the Russians had been playing the system of classifying participants' disabilities was best illustrated by the case of Lasha Murvanadze who disappeared at the 2004 games in Athens following a protest by an opposing team but who has re-emerged in Beijing with a revised disability classification.

And what of the Irish footballer Derek Malone who was suspended because he played better than he should have done in his country's first game which they nevertheless lost? Remarkably, Malone's ban comes four years after he won a bronze medal as an athlete when competing under the same CP classification.

"Are they saying he is disabled when he runs in a straight line but not when he moves from side to side?" said an Irish paralympic official.

Kind of sums it up doesn't it?