It’s the Para… Oh look, American Idol is on!

By Trish Allison

If you thought the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics were bad, than you should see the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Paralympics… oh wait, you can’t because CTV decided not to broadcast Friday evening’s opening ceremonies of the Paralympic Winter Games live across the country. But, if you had just found yourself a little patience you could have watched them Saturday afternoon, when CTV intended to air the taping. The event was shown live on CTV BC, but that only allowed digital subscribers in Canada to tune in. Sir Philip Craven, the president of the International Paralympic Committee said “It absolutely smacks in the face of one of our four values, which is equality”. Craven welcomed the decision to broadcast the ceremonies live in the British Columbia, but he said it was still not good enough.

However, CTV doesn’t see things the same way. They’ve (CTV) said Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium will provide more coverage of a Paralympics Winter Games than ever before. When they say it like that, it kind of sounds like they’re doing a good thing, right? But in reality by “more than ever before” they mean 57 hours. There will be 27 hours of coverage in English on CTV, TSN and Rogers Sportsnet as well as 30 hours of coverage in French on RDS and RIS Info Sports. And the only reason there are additional hours of French is because of rebroadcasts. The coverage will include daily highlights and live coverage of the Games’ most popular sport, sledge hockey.

The coverage of these games are said to break and set records. That’s awesome and disappointing at the same time. It’s awesome because these games will break the record for the amount of coverage given to any Paralympics games. But it’s disappointing at the same time because breaking that record means getting a measly 57 hours and some of those hours are just rebroadcasts. CTV said “It would be erroneous to compare coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Games to coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games,” that’s because the Olympic games got 50,000 hours of coverage worldwide, whereas in 2006 there was only 285 hours of coverage for the Turin Paralympic games. The number of hours covered won’t be known until the end of the games, but they probably won’t even come close to the number of hours for the Olympics. The IPC’s Internet TV channel, www.ParalympicSport.TV, will also provide 150 hours of coverage – hey look at that, they’re up to 207 hours of coverage…

To be fair to all athletes the same amount of coverage should be provided to the Paralympics and Olympics. And if not the same then a hell of a lot more than 57 hours. The athletes in the Paralympics work just as hard as those in the Olympics and deserve the same amount of patriotism, support and respect. With the risk of sounding condescending, people should actually want to support the Paralympic athletes more than a regular athlete as the Paralympic athletes have overcome a disability to succeed at a sport that would be otherwise difficult for them. In life we except to be treated fairly and with respect, yet we don’t practise these characteristics in our everyday actions. In case people had forgotten these athletes are also representing Canada, and their wins are just as important as anyone else’s.

To say that Canadians don’t care would be a lie. But to say they all cared would be an even bigger lie. It’s easy to be angry that the Paralympics don’t get nearly as much coverage as the Olympics, but the truth is there just isn’t enough of an audience for it. For the 2006 Turin Paralympic games there was an audience of 1.4 million viewers – in comparison that’s two episodes of Jerry Springer (3.5 million), about 11times less than the amount of viewers who watched the Canada vs. the US in the gold medal game (16.6 million), and about 20 times less than the amount of viewers who watched the eighth season finale of American Idol (28.84 million). You can’t really blame CTV for not giving the same coverage; they could lose ratings and money. That doesn’t justify the crappy coverage, but it becomes more understandable. TV is a business, and if something isn’t going to sell than why bother to display it on the shelf?

Nonetheless, this blogger would like to wish the best of luck to all the athletes representing Canada in these Winter Paralympic Games – make Canada proud, because we may not show it – literally – but we’re proud of you. GO CANADA GO!

The original article was written by Rod Mickleburgh and can be found on The Globe and Mail website (original)