Ali Jawad posted a picture of himself on a table top this weekend. Mask on, power shake to hand, Jawad’s arms were raised in celebration. The British powerlifter, who was born without legs and also deals with the debilitating effects of Crohn’s disease, had made it to the athletes’ village in Tokyo. “Arrived in the Paralympic village!! Absolutely amazing view from our rooms,” he wrote, adding a drooling emoji to reinforce the point.
Jawad, who returned from Rio with a silver medal in the under 59kg category four years ago, is not alone in getting excited about the facilities. There have been other outbursts of delight on social media from members of the GB team, and collectively the digs have earned themselves a new name, the “Paralympics performance palace”. In the age of Covid, in the midst of an Olympic and Paralympic summer intertwined with a public health crisis, the controllables are everything.
There has been a lot of time and effort put into making the corner of the athletes’ village that is British as much of a home away from home as it can be. But the chef de mission of ParalympicsGB, Penny Briscoe, is still struck by how positive the mood is within the team. “This is my 11th Games and I honestly can’t remember another where the palpable sense of excitement, expectation and anticipation has been as high,” she says. “I’ve been trying to get my head round it. We’ve had athletes coming in for three or four days now and I think there’s an overwhelming sense of how privileged they are to be here against the backdrop of this 18 months of tumultuous challenge. The athletes feel hugely privileged that so much has been done to allow the Games to happen.”
From Tuesday, the athletes will have a chance to act on that privilege. The opening ceremony of the Paralympics will kickstart 12 days of competition, with 1,617 medals at stake. Last time Great Britain won 147 of them, a record in the modern era, a total eclipsing even that of the home Games of 2012. In Rio, ParalympicsGB were clear they wanted to beat the 120 medals won in London. This time, however, they are more circumspect about their targets. UK Sport has created a window of between 100 and 140 medals, with success to be found inside that frame. Briscoe prefers not to involve numbers at all.
“I think it’s difficult to predict the total number of medals that Paralympics GB will win and I think we’re not coming in with that sort of specific target in mind,” she says. “We know we’re in good shape, we’ve got 226 athletes, 19 sports, and all of those sports have had positive performances throughout the cycle.
“I think we’ve got more than 30 returning Paralympic champions. We’ve got world champions, European champions, we have had a successful cycle. We know the quality of the team we’re bringing to the environment.”
Among the returning champions are Sarah Storey, who kicks off the action on day one with an attempt to retain her C4 individual pursuit title. Storey has 14 cycling golds to her name over six Paralympic Games, and if she wins every race she competes in this year, she will become Britain’s most successful Paralympian. At the other end of the event schedule, on day 12, there is David Weir, with the legend of wheelchair racing coming out of retirement to compete in not just the T54 marathon, but also the 1500m and 5,000m.
In between there will be Jonnie Peacock, Hannah Cockroft and Ellie Simmonds, Sophie Hahn, Emma Wiggs and Sophie Wells. There will be new names, such as the cyclist Jaco van Gass and the sprinter Thomas Young. There will be two new sports, too, with Britain boasting world champions in both para-taekwondo and para-badminton, in Matt Bush and Jack Shephard, respectively. “We’re confident that there will be something to cheer about, multiple things to cheer about, every single day of competition,” Briscoe says.
Briscoe believes the successes of London 2012 and the spotlight it shone on para-sport have changed the paradigm for many of the athletes coming into the squad more recently. “I think the profile of para-sport is such now that I think athletes see opportunity,” she says. “I think they see opportunity in terms of their sporting careers and also in their wider careers through the medium of sport. More than ever, I think they see their opportunity to influence the social impact agenda and I think athletes are taking that responsibility really seriously.”
So the mood is good, the standards are high and the platform is as big as it ever has been for disabled athletes. But the scourge of Covid-19 remains. One ParalympicsGB staff member has tested positive, with two members of the swimming team, among others, required to isolate too. Briscoe is confident extra measures to protect the team will work and keep infection out of the village. In this unique environment, however, the pandemic remains the great uncontrollable.
