Para athletes: "Inspiration porn" and stereotypes, the difficult access to sponsors
As the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games get underway, not all participating athletes have benefited from sponsors, despite the crucial importance of this support in enabling them to fully and confidently commit to their sporting careers.
Yann Beldame, University of Montpellier; Hélène Joncheray, Paris Cité University; Rémi Richard, University of Montpellier and Valentine Duquesne, Paris Cité University
For Paralympic athletes, access to sponsors does not depend solely on athletic performance... far from it. Disability and its narrative often take precedence over athletic performance itself. The problem? Not all disabilities and Paralympic disciplines are considered inspiring by non-disabled people; as a result, some parasports athletes find themselves neglected by sponsors.
This is the finding of a survey conducted among 15 Paralympic athletes pre-selected for the recent Tokyo Games and 42 members of their staff (sports directors, coaches, physical therapists, physical and mental trainers, doctors, sports assistants, guides, and family members).
A distorted view of parasports due to bias
The interviews conducted for the survey highlight that access to sponsors is not solely—or even primarily—linked to athletic performance; it is heavily dependent on disability, and especially on the type of recognition associated with it.
Two categories of parasports athletes are therefore more likely to be sponsored, as one of the athletes interviewed summarizes:
"In general, they are amputees who are very able-bodied. [...] And even if it's a prosthesis, there's a bit of technology involved, it's beautiful, bionic. People can identify with those," he says. And then there are those who are athletic, but who inspire a little pity, a double amputee, a little guy. In that case, it's more about sponsorship, like we need to help him because he's brave."
This description actually corresponds to a distorted view of athletes with disabilities, influenced by two major biases, defined in 1989 by sociologists Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron (who identified them in studies on the working classes): populism and miserabilism.
The first tends to aestheticize the disabled body and the life journeys of Paralympic athletes, while viewing them as a kind of superhero. The second consists of perceiving "all differences as deficiencies, all otherness as inferiority."
[Already more than 120,000 subscriptions to The Conversation newsletters. How about you? Subscribe today to better understand the major issues facing the world.]
At the intersection of these two biases lies "inspiration porn": the tendency of non-disabled people to be inspired by disabled people, based on their every move, which is considered exceptional given their disability, which is itself assumed to be tragic. https://www.youtube.com/embed/SxrS7-I_sMQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Lecture by Australian actress, journalist, and disability rights activist Stella Young on inspiration porn and the objectification of disability, TEDxSydney 2014.
Inspiration porn thus combines miserabilism, which presupposes that the lives of athletes with disabilities are necessarily harder and more unhappy than those of athletes without disabilities, and populism, which transforms ordinary people and events into heroes and exceptional deeds.
A rejected bias: miserabilism
In high-level parasports, miserabilism can be seen, for example, in photos published in the media: according to a 2011 study conducted in five European countries, Paralympic athletes at the Sydney (2000), Athens (2004), and Beijing (2008) Games were photographed in much less active poses than non-disabled athletes, reinforcing the miserabilist view that presents people with disabilities as weak and inactive individuals.
While the sympathy and compassion associated with miserabilism may encourage some sponsors to fund athletes, this bias is strongly denounced and rejected by athletes and their staff: some regret that the media dramatizes their stories and neglects their sporting achievements, others consider that parasports athletes are often presented as necessarily unhappy, while others still want above all to be considered as high-level athletes.
Miserabilism can also have a counterproductive effect on access to sponsorship and could even harm certain disciplines, such as boccia—a sport similar to pétanque, but played in wheelchairs, in mixed teams, with leather balls. The reason? Interest generated by miserabilism would decrease as the degree of disability increases. In other words, a mild disability is better, in terms of interest and sponsorship, than a more severe and visible disability.
Added to this is the fact that boccia has no equivalent among non-disabled people, and is therefore less "inspiring" for able-bodied people: as it does not incorporate inspiration porn, this sport is therefore less worthy of interest... and funding.
A risky bias: populism
A possible escape from pessimism: embracing the idea of the cyborg athlete, equipped with mobility technologies (wheelchair, prosthetics).
A study published in 2011 estimated that the further a Paralympic athlete's body is from this ideal, the more likely it is that a tragic—rather than heroic—image will develop about that athlete, and that the athlete will be the victim of miserabilism.
According to the survey conducted by INSEP and the University of Montpellier, Paralympic athletes perceived as cyborgs are, on the other hand, well protected from a miserabilist media representation... but the hype surrounding their superhuman abilities exposes them to a more populist representation of their sport.
The 2011 study on media coverage of parasports, mentioned above, also revealed an overrepresentation of athletes in wheelchairs and/or with prosthetics in published photos, and an underrepresentation of athletes with less technologically advanced disabilities.
Beyond stories of cyborg athletes, another populist view of Paralympic athletes is to consider them as "supercrips": athletes who make heroic and high-performance use of their disabled bodies.
The theme of resilience through sport is often highlighted, based on a narrative that recounts and glorifies the extraordinary and heroic qualities of a Paralympic athlete—as well as their very special achievements despite their disability.
A bias with multiple risks: it claims that individual effort can achieve anything, thereby glossing over injustices and inequalities of opportunity between able-bodied and disabled athletes.
It also perpetuates the idea that only extraordinary people can succeed in parasports. This view is far from realistic and falls into the trap of inspiration porn: people without disabilities find it difficult to assess the real abilities of parasports athletes and often project low expectations onto them, leading to unjustified praise.
Parasports athletes: both victims and perpetrators of bias
However, the survey reveals that athletes themselves, through their presentations to the media, companies, or in their social media posts, do not necessarily seek to oppose populism or inspiration porn... since these biases allow them to access sponsors.
"Actually, they don't really care about my results. It's really the sacrifices I make every day that seem to interest them more," says one Paralympic swimmer, for example.
Athletes are thus confronted with inspirational porn and are forced to accept it, since this narrative is what sponsors want to sell. Sponsors expect and prefer to fund stories about pushing oneself beyond one's limits and the heroic aspect of life despite disability, which is what parasports athletes portray.
For the latter, the question arises: do sponsors give them money because they admire their sporting achievements despite their disability, or does the funding reward the efforts they make every day in their quest for medals?
The study ultimately highlights two important findings: on the one hand, social norms exclude less inspiring parasports athletes from access to sponsors; on the other hand, they force them to emphasize their disability rather than their athletic performance.
A change of perspective is needed
To change this distorted view, shaped by pessimism, populism, and inspiration porn, the athletes interviewed have some ideas. Starting with removing the distinction between sports and disabled sports. "The goal is to reach the same level... to become a sport. Not a disabled sport, not a sport for the disabled [...], but to become a sport like any other," explains a member of a national wheelchair rugby team. "To be on the same level as everyone else, so that we can enjoy the same things." He also argues that disability should become the norm.
According to researchers at INSEP and the University of Montpellier, developing a "policy of taking difference into account" would make it possible to recognize not only parasports that inspire people without disabilities, but all parasports on the basis of the unique sporting experience.
While waiting for such a change in perspective, the sociologists' publication is already paving the way for new studies. In particular, it encourages reflection on the gendered dimension of representations of Paralympic athletes and its importance in the allocation of sponsors. It would be interesting, for example, to focus new research on an intersectional perspective in order to analyze how gender and disability interact in the process of Paralympic athletes' access to sponsors.
Yann Beldame, Anthropologist, University of Montpellier; Hélène Joncheray, Sports Sociologist, HDR, Paris Cité University; Rémi Richard, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport and Disability, University of Montpellier and Valentine Duquesne, PhD in Sports Sociology, Paris Cité University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.