Sports fans flocked to Paris as the Paralympic Games kicked off last week. Just as they did in the recent Summer Games, Texans are playing a big part, sending the third-largest U.S. contingent.
They’re competing in events ranging from track and field, to wheelchair basketball; swimming to goalball.
Reporter Amanda Morris is in Paris covering the games for the Washington Post. She says U.S. athletes are in the thick of the medal race. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: From a spectator’s point of view, it seems like there’s more attention on the Paralympics this year than ever before. Does it feel that way from where you are and what’s it like to cover the event?
Amanda Morris: It has been really exciting, and it definitely feels like there’s more attention on the Paralympics this year.
France showed up! At a lot of the events I’ve been going to, the fans that are from France and in Paris have been just coming in droves and filling stadiums. I’ve been to several games that have been completely packed, and everybody’s going berserk and cheering and stomping, and it’s just so exciting to see Paralympians finally getting the same attention as Olympians.
We’re all medal counters when it comes to these kinds of games. How is Team USA doing in the standings? Are there one or two standout medal performances we should know about?
The last time I checked, we were ranked third on the medal count. We had about 15 gold medals and 45 medals overall. Ahead of us are Great Britain and China.
There have been some really exciting gold medal wins. One has been Matt Stutzman. He’s an armless archer. He has said this is likely going to be his final Paralympics, and he went out on a really high note, winning a gold medal in archery for the compound. And it was just really cool to see because that arrow that won gold for him was like dead center.
And last night I went to the wheelchair rugby gold medal match. It was the U.S. versus Japan. Unfortunately, the U.S. lost, but it was a really exciting game and it was a historic win for Japan because it was their first time playing in the gold medal match and winning it.
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Oh, I’d love to see that in person – wheelchair rugby. Well, the Paralympics include a number of adaptive versions of familiar sports like track and field or archery. There are also events that are unique to athletes with disabilities. Can you tell us a little bit about goalball?
This was actually my favorite event besides wheelchair rugby that I went to see. And it’s a sport that is created for blind and low-vision athletes.
It’s based almost entirely on sound, as well as touch. And it’s a sport in which basically there’s a court and there’s a goal on either side. There are three players on each team, and they’re hurling this ball that has bells in it towards each other, trying to get in the goal, and the athletes on the other team have to block the ball using their bodies, kind of like a reverse dodgeball.
And the way that they can tell where the ball is, is by listening for that jingle. So everybody has to be completely quiet when they’re watching the game. And it felt almost like I was watching like a chess match or something, like I was just so silent and everybody was so focused. And then the second a team gets a goal, it wraps in this like thunderous roar. It’s really cool.
I understand that accessibility in Paris has been challenging in some areas. Can you talk about getting around the games for people with physical disabilities, both the athletes and the fans?
Yeah. So, I would say in general, the Paralympics and Paris has done a pretty good job on accessibility in the sense that you can tell that they’ve really thought about it and put in effort into trying to make this games more accessible than any of the games in the past.
But then at the same time, not everything has been perfect. Especially on the fan side of things.
The Paris Metro is infamously inaccessible, so fans in wheelchairs cannot actually take the Metro between most of the different stadiums and competition venues, and usually have to take a bus – which takes a lot longer and there’s some hiccups there. There are also sometimes some issues with just getting around Paris, like the old cobblestone streets and the curb cuts and things like that.
