and now inclusion? – Liberation

A sporting and popular success, the Games ended on Sunday. A momentum which must translate into real inclusion of people with disabilities in French society.

The weight of words… Remember, it was a month ago, the key word which accompanied the closing of the Olympic Games was that of parenthesis, often adorned with the adjective enchantée. On Sunday, the Paralympic Games ended with the same cocktail of organizational success, popular enthusiasm or emotions in the face of extraordinary performances, with a French sporting record also among the forecasts. And yet, the word parenthesis has almost disappeared from the delighted comments describing the fortnight we have just experienced. From there to deducing that the Olympic Games were valuable in forgetting politics, and that the Paralympics were just as valuable in bringing us back to it, there is only one step. Because if sporting magic, with its explosions of joy, its rivers of tears, the admiration at an exploit from elsewhere or the cowardly bias not always reasonable but whatever, has irrigated these Paralympic Games as it had done during the first half of August, the question of “what now” also immediately comes out of the hat.

And now what will happen to people with disabilities? What will happen in sports federations to respond to the enthusiasm for sporting activities generated by the Games, particularly among young people with disabilities? More generally, after this fortnight of inclusion in mondovision, what will happen to finally accelerate the investments necessary to facilitate the accessibility of so many schools, so many public service premises, so much infrastructure of transport, of so many companies… And since there has been a lot of talk in recent days about the “change of view” of society on disability that these Paralympic Games have made possible, let us end with an allusion to these children’s eyes crossed paths in the Paris metro on Sunday morning. The young boy was going with his parents to the Olympic site at Bercy. Full of hope and desire, he jumped impatiently onto the platform. He had a slight disability. A question as soon as the doors were closed emerged in our wandering minds: what hopes, what impatience will fuel, in the days, weeks, months to come, the discussions in this family? Or in so many others?