Paralympic Opening Ceremony

London can be rightly proud of the Opening Ceremony of The XIV Paralympiad. How far we have come since 1968 when Mexico City refused to host the Paralympics, now the bidder cities must bid for the Olympics and Paralympics together. The London 2012 Paralympic Games kicked off with an opening ceremony that starred Professor Stephen Hawking, veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen and a double amputee war veteran who rode a zip wire into the Olympic Stadium. The show was watched in the stadium by some 80,000 spectators and members of the Royal Family, including the Queen. A sphere ignited the "big bang" - something which Prof Hawking, a world-renowned physicist who has motor neurone disease, has written about extensively - to start the show and fireworks lit up the stadium.

The Paralympic flame going through Stoke Mandeville village

The 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony looked good from here in Stoke Mandeville. What a wonderful paean to the human spirit and the vision of Sir Ludwig Guttmann. I loved the intertwining of Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, both Lucasian Professors of Mathematics at Cambridge 300 years apart.

The performance of “Spasticus Autisticus”, an edgy song by Britain’s most famous Raspberry and polio victim, Ian Dury, was special and emotional. 'Hello to you out there in Normal Land,' the lyric went, 'you may not comprehend my tale or understand.' Normal Land watched on. Not with distaste. Or disdain. Those kinds of emotions began to seep away a long time ago. Not even with indifference. No, Normal Land gazed at the Opening Ceremony for the London Paralympics with admiration, even a little envy.

The first games - Stoke Mandeville 1948

The Paralympic torch began its journey here in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, the spiritual home of the Paralympic Games, on Tuesday night. It was carried by 580 torchbearers in total, and after being carried past some of London's most famous landmarks, was used to light a scaled-down version of the Olympic cauldron.

The Paralympics has never had an opening like this and it is a credit to London that it is set to repeat the success of the London Olympics which have been widely praised for their organisation and the quality of the spectator and athlete experiences.

In the countdown to the Opening, the crowd was shown a video of some people who had battled their disabilities, including Margaret Maughan. Now 84, she won Britain’s first Paralympics gold medal in 1960 in archery after being treated at Stoke Mandeville hospital - the birthplace of the Paralympics - by Ludwig Guttmann, the inspirational doctor whose brainchild they were and where the Games began in 1948. There were cheers as each of the 166 participating countries paraded into the stadium. In total more than 4,200 athletes will compete for 503 gold medals over the next 11 days - the greatest celebration of Paralympic sport the world has seen. Later Margaret Maughan was to light the Paralympic Cauldron in the Olympic Stadium.

The real legacy of these Paralympics will be to change the attitude to disability and disabled people which is still in practice appalling, particularly at a time when much of the support structure in the UK is being undermined with withdrawal of benefits, closure of Remploy factories and crude, inept and insensitive assessments  outsourced to French computer company ATOS. Warm motherhood statements by “soundbite” grabbing politicians at Opening Ceremonies will not be enough to create a real legacy, ask any disabled person about the reality of their lives and attitudes in GB 2012.

They can take inspiration from “Poppa” Guttmann’s own struggle to create a better future for those in his care in the wooden hut which was Ward X at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.  He had to overcome the widely held belief, both within the medical profession and among the public, that patients, once they had been paralysed, faced a pointless future and could never be reintegrated into society. And because of that his colleagues in the medical profession were baffled by Guttmann’s zeal for his new Stoke Mandeville job.

“They could not understand how I could leave Oxford University to be engulfed in the hopeless and depressing task of looking after traumatic spinal paraplegics,” he said. 

(‘Spirit of Stoke Mandeville’ by Susan Goodman, Collins, 1986).

Guttmann fundamentally disagreed with the commonly held medical view on a paraplegic patient's future and felt it essential to restore hope and self-belief in his patients as well practical re-training so when they were well enough to leave they could once more contribute to society.

There was no sentimentality about Guttmann who believed disabled people must not be left to wither and die but must be transformed to have a viable and fulfilling life, a concept echoed in Prospero’s words which Ian McKellen spoke last night;

"O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in't!

Poppa Guttmann’s reward, before his death in 1980, was to see the start of the transformation of his modest concept into the Paralympics, and thereby a transformation in the public perception not just of disabled athletes but of disability in general.

For the history of the Paralympics & Stoke Mandeville see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/paralympic-games.html

Marc Quinn’s sculpture of artist Alison Lapper — imperious, naked, pregnant, congenitally armless and with truncated legs