The ‘Para’ in paralympics, I stupidly thought stood for ‘paraplegics’. Well, duh, it stands for ‘parallel’.

The Russians have been bad. Very bad according to the McLaren report. Sport doping has been rife from the Kremlin down to power lifters’ jock straps.

And sport doping is not fair. Valerie Adams didn’t like it when Nadzeya Ostapchuk from Belarus  (who by the way looks a lot like my friend Robbie, who broke the New  Zealand Plunket record for  biggest head circumference when he was a baby), nicked off with her gold medal using banned substances.

It made me wonder: do Paralympians get drug tested as well? Do they cheat? Do they have the same potential to be bad?

A similar question to one that I pondered at Barcelona airport: “Do they search disabled people for drugs?”. The answer was resoundingly affirmative as moments later they swabbed me extensively, including my shoes for traces of various prohibited substances.

The 'para' in Paralympics, I stupidly thought stood for 'paraplegics'. Well duh, its stands for 'parallel', as in running alongside the Olympics with equal status.

And in parallel with Olympics Sports, doping is also prevalent in the Paralympics, with five positive cases being reported in the 1992 Barcelona games.

One self-administered and rather harrowing Paralympic doping technique I read about is called boosting. This works by tricking the body into a state of high blood pressure and high heart rate, with the subsequent increased utilization of oxygen improving the athlete's performance.  

Athletes who perform boosting before or during an event will often purposely harm themselves, with some taking extreme measures to achieve the desired boost level. Definitely not for the faint-hearted. 

The Paralympics have come a long way since they were first staged in 1976 in Sweden. Paralympians have their own  celebrities, Kiwi’s Sophie Pascoe  and our very own Northland boy Cameron Leslie,

 The way the Paralympics are reported on is now catching up with the reporting of mainstream Olympics. The Northern Advocate was recently a good example of this, listing all the Northland Paralympians, undifferentiated from the mainstream.

On another positive side, the 2016 Paralympic Games have inspired the production of a new proposed set of emojis. Emojis are the vaguely annoying graphic alternatives to alpha numeric text you can use to supplement your internet postings.

The only official emoji representing disability is the old wheelchair symbol, commonly used to identify accessible toilets. British charity Scope has just released a wide range of emojis depicting  sportsmen and women with disabilities, which are vibrant, positive  and remind us of the huge spectrum of disability. Go to blog.scope.org.uk to download and use a few to cheer on our athletes. 

Downloadable pdf below:

Published 25/07/2016