Not so long ago the gloriously grumpy playwright and national treasure Alan Bennett was asked what England excelled at the most. Hypocrisy, he replied, taking pithy swipes at politicians, public schools, and the way English people often say they want one thing while doing something else entirely.
Bennett’s comments came to mind when reading the astonishing report of a British Para-swimmer’s father buying a wheelchair on eBay in an attempt to hoodwink assessors into thinking his child was more seriously disabled. Worse still, a member of British Swimming was claimed to have pushed the swimmer around in the wheelchair.
Yet, according to the parent who told MPs of the case, after the classification status arrived the wheelchair disappeared – and “this swimmer can be seen on videos jumping up and down poolside or running up and down the stairs in the stands”.
This is not just bending the rules. It is snapping them. It is cheating, pure and simple. So much for the virtues of fair play on which the English, and British sport, prides itself.
And as each passing day brings a fresh revelation, the sense that this is a scandal only grows. On Saturday a former International Paralympic Committee expert even claimed to have seen athletes drugging themselves with Valium, rolling in the snow and taping their limbs before classification assessments in the hope of getting an easier category to compete.
The IPC insists its classification is “robust”. But I have heard countless tales that suggest it is flawed, including one of athletes having incredibly tough weight sessions before classification so the body is stiff, or coming off medication, to try and cheat the system. Each time when there was a sniff of a medal the separation between black and white became far more murky.
Staggeringly, British athletes were also threatened with losing places on teams if they publicly raised concerns. As Tanni Grey-Thompson, one of our greatest Paralympians, told parliament: “It’s somewhere between bullying and control.”
When I asked one coach why he kept quiet, his response was simple but devastating: “I believe my athletes might lose their funding or travel opportunities.”
Few observers would dispute Grey-Thompson’s claim that intentional misrepresentation is akin to doping in Olympic sport. Or that the current classification system is not fit for purpose. But we need to be honest with ourselves as a country, too. Some of these problems are the unintended consequences of the UK Sport funding system, which is predicated on medals.
The equation is simple. You win. You get. The sums at stake are not trivial. British Athletics and British Swimming will get more than £11m each in the run-up to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics.
You only have to look at Britain’s wheelchair rugby squad to see what happens when a team are perceived to have fallen short. The money dries up. Athletes are no longer funded. Coaches lose their jobs. Under that pressure is it any wonder that people try to work the system?
There are many talented and impressive people inside UK Sport. But the organisation has long needed to broaden its definition of success beyond gold, silver and bronze. For Para-sport, for instance, it could take in a measure of how many more people with disabilities are involved in playing, coaching or organising. As one coach put it to me, “Lottery funding was supposed to make a nation proud and to get people fit. Is it actually achieving both those objectives?”
Of course Britain is not the only nation trying to work the Para-sport system. It is in every country’s interest to do so. That is why Michael Breen, a sports lawyer whose daughter Olivia is a talented Para-sport sprinter and long jumper and who testified in parliament last week, is urging the IPC to make fundamental changes to restore trust in the system.
He believes it is essential that a medical doctor sits on beefed-up classification panels at all times – rather than an occupational or physical therapist, as is often the case – to ensure assessments are more robust. And he has urged the IPC to introduce full-time professional classifiers who can travel the world ensuring uniform standards.
Yet so far he is banging his head against a brick wall. “I have spoken to over 100 coaches, athletes and their parents who feel the system is fundamentally flawed but the IPC keep insisting it is fine,” he says. “This classification problem is the worst kept secret in Paralympic sport – and if it is allowed to fester as it is, it will destroy it.”
The tragedy is that most Paralympic athletes are genuinely in the right class based on their disabilities – and that so much of what they do is fantastic and inspirational, too.
Even five years on from London 2012 I vividly remember a conversation with the American swimmer Bradley Snyder, who had won a gold in the men’s S11 400m freestyle a year to the day after he was blinded while working as a bomb defuser in Afghanistan. He called losing his sight “a relatively miserable experience” but insisted that the Paralympics had given him a “new go at life” which he intended to enjoy to the fullest.
That is the joy of Paralympic sport. It would be a tragedy if that something so precious was drowned by tidal waves of cynicism and suspicion.
