OPINION: Merging the Olympics and Paralympics

SCOPE, the charity for people with Cerebral Palsy, has called for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games to be merged. The logic is that it will improve the status of the disabled in society as awhile, improve the way that disabled sport is viewed, and stop people looking down on the Paralympics as they may currently do.

All well and good, maybe.

The problem comes in the practicalities of merging these two quite separate events.

In reality, the media coverage would still, in all likelihood, focus on the able-bodied sportsmen and women who will be running faster, jumping higher and setting records that the vast majority of paralympians can never ever dream of achieving.

Oskar Pistorias, the "Blade Runner", is actually being allowed to compete in the Olympics against able-bodied athletes - maybe that's a way ahead? Or will the advantages/disadvantages of special equipment simply nullify the sports?

The next problem comes with how to merge the events - the Paralympics has man more events than the Olympics because it has different "classes" for each slight variation in disability. This means that, if all events are maintained, a joint Olympic/Paralympic medal table would be heavily weighted in favour of the countries with more disabled athletes competing. So the disabled community, a small minority of society, would occupy the majority of medals - that is, surely, a nonsense?

It would, of course, be totally unacceptable to everyone for a Paralympic Gold to only be worth, say, a tenth of an Olympic gold, so that problem is insurmountable.

The next problem comes with the staging of the combined games - having all the facilities available at the same time for both events and the time to do it. The combined Games would, I suspect, end up running to a month or more - unless a swathe of events were scrapped - and I thought the point of this was inclusion and acceptance?

I guess SCOPE are generating publicity for their cause by linking themselves to the Olympic Games but there suggestion, perfectly good on the surface, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny and, in fact, might end up doing disabled athletes a dis-service in the long run.