The most important Paralympic Games of all time — at least according to International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons — arrived at the start line on Tuesday.
Parsons made that claim about the Paralympics when there were 100 days to go and repeated it Friday. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat the virus still poses and the impact it has had specifically on people with disabilities have given added weight to these Games, which are scheduled to run from Tuesday until Sept. 5.
“Sports were not, of course, exempt from the COVID-19 pandemic and we have faced many restrictions,” para taekwondo athlete Shoko Ota said during a news conference Sunday.
“We focused on thinking about what we could do day by day to get to the Games. Training after days of not being able to — with restrictions such as the state of emergency — made me realize again how fun sports are.”
Athletes, who have had to endure a one-year delay and then further doubts about whether the Games would actually take place, will have a chance to see the fruits of their labor when competition begins Wednesday.
“Ever since I got to the airport I’ve been full of excitement because we’ve been focused on this,” Mexican powerlifter Amalia Perez said Sunday. “Right before we arrived there was another wave (of infections) and we were worried the Games wouldn’t happen. Now that we’re here, we need to take care of ourselves and follow the rules and make sure these Games are a success.”
The Tokyo Paralympics will host a record number of Paralympians, according to Craig Spence, the IPC’s chief brand and communications officer.
“We’re going to have 4,403 athletes competing here over the next 12 days,” Spence said Tuesday morning. “That is a record, the most number of athletes ever to compete at a Paralympic Games.
“To achieve that, bearing in mind how hard it has been for many National Paralympic Committees to get athletes to competitions in the last 20 months, is a remarkable achievement. The previous record was 4,328, which was set at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.”
The Paralympics arrive on the heels of an Olympic Games where Japan enjoyed its best-ever performance, claiming 27 gold medals — the third-most at the Games — and 58 overall. The nation’s Paralympians, led by wheelchair tennis great Shingo Kunieda, will try to follow suit and erase the bitter memories of 2016, when Japan left the Rio Paralympics with no gold medals.
While there were coronavirus infections among people connected to the Olympics — including athletes — the event completed its run with no major disruptions. Now Paralympic organizers will try to repeat that feat.
Tokyo Organising Committee spokesman Masa Takaya updated the testing numbers pertaining to the Games hours before the opening ceremony.
“Since July 1 until Aug. 22, there were 51,000, nearly 52,000, airport tests conducted,” he said. “Among those, 49 cases were found to be positive. The positivity rate is 0.09%.”
Total screening tests over the same period stood at nearly 767,000, with the number of positive results totaling 236 — meaning the positivity rate was 0.03%.
Still, these Paralympics, like the Olympics that preceded them from July 23 to Aug. 8, will take place with the host city under a state of emergency. Cases have been on the rise in Tokyo and the highly infectious delta variant has added a new wrinkle.
“We are facing quite a challenging situation in Japan,” Games Delivery Officer Hidemasa Nakamura said Saturday. “During the Olympic Games, COVID-19 countermeasures were activated and they have been really effective to some extent, so we would like to continue with these efforts during the Paralympic Games.”
Officials will again lean on the so-called playbooks, the organizing committee’s guidelines for preventing the spread of the virus, as a way to keep both athletes and the general public safe.
Concerns about the pandemic will also render the Paralympics nearly as silent as the Olympics, with fans again barred from attending most events.
There are, however, plans to allow schoolchildren to attend some events. But many people, including Shigeru Omi, chairman of the government subcommittee on the nation’s COVID-19 response, have questioned the wisdom of such a program.
“This concept was presented to the IPC by the Japanese authorities in a four-party meeting last week,” Spence said Saturday. “We asked if it could be done safely and they said yes.
“We wouldn’t support the idea if it couldn’t be done safely. It is the same with the Paralympic Games. We wouldn’t be sitting here if we didn’t believe we could deliver the Games safely.”
Even amid the spread of the coronavirus, athletes and officials are hopeful the Games can bring more attention to those with impairments and lead to a society that is more understanding of their needs — especially during the current pandemic.
“Persons with disabilities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic around the world,” Parsons said in an interview with Kyodo News on Aug. 19. “Different societies across the world have failed to protect them, have failed to provide them with the necessary services to protect them from the pandemic.
“We believe persons with disabilities have been left behind. That is why these Games are not just important to have, but they are needed from the perspective of the 1.2 billion persons around the world.”
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