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Double Paralympic champion Richard Whitehead believes London 2012 was a missed opportunity to make sport more inclusive as he looks to challenge perceptions in a new documentary.
Whitehead, a double amputee who won Paralympic 200m gold in London and Rio, has teamed up with LGBTQ+ advocate and broadcaster Adele Roberts to produce Dare to Defy, a three-part Prime Video series which explores the stereotypes and barriers that under-represented communities face in sport.
The London Paralympics lifted the profile of disabled athletes in the UK at the time but Whitehead, 48, regrets the failure to build a real legacy.
Asked if it was a missed opportunity, he told the PA news agency: “For sure. It was fantastic, wasn’t it?
“I don’t think the general members of the public and the community really understood how powerful the Paralympics was, but it’s only once every four years, and a person with a disability deserves to have that impact 365 days a year.
“That’s the real problem with the Paralympics as well – it’s not fully inclusive. It doesn’t represent the whole disabled community…
“There are only certain events in the Paralympics. It doesn’t incorporate the deaf community. People from the learning disability community have very few events.
“My event, the 200 metres, has been taken out of the Paralympic programme now, so I’m not even represented on the track anymore. My 200m gold, that I won in front of 80,000 people, isn’t there anymore, so people that have got a similar disability can’t have that opportunity anymore.
“That’s the reason why I advocate for a new conversation around inclusivity.”
In the documentary Whitehead visits Nissan’s Formula E Team and travels to Tokyo for Nissan Connect, a running race for the visually impaired. Roberts visits Manchester City, and the pair then work to create ‘Run to the Future’, an inclusive running event in London.
Whitehead, who has set world records in both the full and half marathon, said he wants the series to challenge perceptions about what inclusivity really means.
“The documentary challenges what the preconception of inclusion is, and it challenges, not only the able-bodied community but also the disability community about how they can get involved in sport, what some of those barriers and obstacles are,” he said.
“It will hopefully educate a wider community around those challenges.
“Within my 20 years of being involved in sport, there’s been some strides forward around getting more people with disabilities into roles of representation, but unfortunately, they’re few and far between.
“The message I’m still getting from the disability community is that they don’t feel that those opportunities are available.
“There’s so much more still to be done, and there’s a lot of tokenism within the community, and able-bodied people think that disabled people have had the opportunities but the discrimination that still happens in society is still vast, whether that’s through sport or whether that’s through employment.”
Whitehead believes the focus needs to be on community engagement and mass participation events, but these would only be the start.
“The thing that I take away from doing this documentary is, yes, there’s so much work that we still need to do, but we’re starting that process,” he said.
“We need to address some of the real issues, create solutions for the community, and have leaders in these areas to advocate for the benefits of being inclusive. I met some incredible people along the journey. The future is bright, but we have much more work to do.”
:: Dare to Defy is available on Prime Video from 3rd December, International Day of Persons with Disabilities
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