Disability Sport Gets £3.5M Boost

Disability Sport is to receive £3.5m as part of the government’s plan to change the lives of the 10 million disabled people in the UK.

Tessa Jowell MP, minister for the Olympics and Paralympics, today launched the Disability Legacy Plan, an ambitious strategy to use the 2012 games as a springboard to integrate disabled people more fully into society.

The intention is to get more disabled people playing sport, to improve transport systems, provide better employment opportunities for the disabled and change attitudes, aided in part by Channel 4’s coverage of the Paralympics.

Jonathan Shaw MP, the minister for disabled people called it the government’s “vision of disability equality by 2025”.

Tessa Jowell MP told Channel 4 News: “The Olympics will affect the lives of 10 million disabled people, who will be more included in the life of Britain and Britain will be the better for it.”

She added: “I don’t think you can’t possibly describe the power of the Paralympics unless you’ve actually watched paralympic sport and many of the sports that people don’t know anything about which I think will become cult viewing when the time comes.”

The Disability Legacy Plan was launched at the Laburnam Boat Club in Hackney, east London with ministers, paralympians and disabled canoeists in attendance. “Paddleability”, Sport England’s drive to get more disabled people into canoes, has seen disabled participation double in a year.

Disabled people can be put off by the initial challenge of getting involved in a sport.

At Laburnam, they’ve attracted disabled canoeists by offering what they call a “half way house”, providing separate courses to get people familiar and comfortable at the club before introducing them to fully-integrated events.

Channel 4 News met players at a London Wheelchair Rugby Club training session in Stanmore, north London.

Many of the team are paralympians who represented Britain in Beijing, where they finished fourth. They say, with the home crowd behind them in 2012, they intend to finish on the podium.

Almost none started life in a wheelchair; car crashes, accidents, even rugby injuries put them there. Sport has given them, they say, a new lease of life. They’ve chosen an intense game.

The rules are very different from rugby union. Each team has four players competing at any one time with unlimited subbing through a match. All are given points based on their disability, the lower your points, the more disabilities you have, and the number of points a team on the court has can’t add up to more than eight.

It’s played in bespoke wheelchairs, with the constant sound of loud “contact” as the chairs are skilfully crashed into each other – that’s a tackle, as Steve Palmer, Paralympian Rugby vice captain, Beijing told Channel 4 News: “if you want the ball, you just smash the hell out of someone. Chair contact is fine. So if you hit someone with the front of your chair, knock them out and they’re on the floor, that’s absolutely fine, it’s all legal.”

Andy Barrow, captain of the Paralympian Wheelchair Rugby squad in Beijing, explained how the sport has given him a life and a career he’d never have had. “I would never have been able to play for England if I hadn’t been in a wheelchair”.

He wants other people with disabilities to gain from sport too: “We’re not just people in wheelchairs “having a go”, we’re athletes who happen to be disabled…however, we do need that grassroots, we do need to have people so they can just “have a go” in whatever sport, and your disability should not be a barrier.”