Sim Chi Yin is heartened that support for disability sports is growing.

In Beijing

"MAYBE even terrorists are not interested in the Paralympics." 

So grumbled a fellow journalist covering these Games for the world's top physically disabled athletes.

A Chinese worker changes Olympic banners to
Paralympic banners on a street light pole in Beijing.
 Photo: AP

For all buzz and security worries over the Beijing Olympics – China's big-bang coming-of-age party – there's considerably less hoo-ha about its equivalent for the disabled. The international and local journalist pack is visibly much thinner on the ground, and for days before the Paralympics opened on Saturday, even the notoriously-tight security checks around the Olympic venues seemed somewhat more relaxed. 

At a welcome ceremony for Team China at the Paralympics Village two weekends ago for instance, journalists were able to come within an arm's length of top Chinese officials – usually a no-no. 

While it is a relief that Beijing is finally less anxious about something – anything – going wrong during this Olympic season, the relative disinterest in the Paralympics has long troubled many within the disability sports fraternity and beyond. 

No matter how much China's top politicians stress "Two Olympics, equally splendid",  there is no denying that the Olympics was, as an academic put it to me, "the favourite son" while the Paralympics are "a distant cousin". 

Even the host country's largely controlled media has been noticeably less enthusiastic about these Games compared to the Olympics for which they put out reams of stories. 

A local journalist was overheard telling another that his newspaper had cut back from eight daily pages during the Olympics to one page per day for the Paralympics. 

Another Chinese scribe complained to me that her sports colleagues had "disappeared" after the Olympics, leaving her, a social issues reporter, to cover these Games. 

All that is hardly peculiar to China. Apart from the BBC, CCTV and a handful of broadcasters in a sprinkling of countries which have fielded large Paralympian delegations, these Games are not on television. And it is hardly unusual to find Paralympics news reports running in the 'social' or 'home news' sections of many a newspaper.

It is also true that the Paralympics has not been a magnet for protests as the Olympics was – when activists for a range of causes picked their moment to berate China. 

At the Paralympics so far, only a lone Chinese streaker – who kept her bra and jeans on – struck out by dashing onto the pitch during the opening ceremony on Saturday(6sept). But if she had a cause, she was not able to shout it. She was quickly wrestled to the ground and a day later pronounced "mentally unstable" by officials. 

The Singapore contingent marches out at Saturday's
Opening Ceremony with Theresa Goh as flag bearer.
ST Photo: Sim Chi Yin

At the heart of this relative lack of interest in the Paralympics is perhaps the perception that disability sport is not 'real' sport but just a means of rehabilitation, or worse, social welfare for the handicapped. Some may also dismiss the level of competition at the Paralympics as "not as high" as that at the Olympics. Others may be averse to watching imperfect bodies stretching themselves to the limit – instead of the tanned, toned ones sported by Olympians. 

Thankfully for many in the fraternity, the Beijing Paralympics show many encouraging signs of a growing appetite for disability sport at the highest level. 

More than 6,000 journalists applied for accreditation to cover these Games, twice the number which reported on the previous Paralympics in Athens. It probably helps that many foreign newspapers, TV stations and wire agencies already have a stable of correspondents based in Beijing, ready to cover the Paralympics even if their headquarters decided against sending an army of reporters like many did for the Olympics. 

New technology is also helping. With little Paralympic action on TV around the world, the International Paralympic Committee – the mothership organisation for disability sport – is harnassing the Internet and putting live coverage of these Games on YouTube or www.paralympicsport.tv.

That may help convince many of the unconverted. One just needs to sit for a short while in the stands to watch swimmers with no arms do the Butterfly or watch a double amputee run the 100m to feel thoroughly awed by elite disability sport and the power of the human body and mind. 

Covering the Paralympics for a second time now, I am reminded of what swim coach Ang Peng Siong told me in Athens in 2004, as we flew back together with the team of eight Singaporean Paralympians who had quietly done the Republic proud. It had been, for both of us, a first-time, first-hand experience of the Paralympics.

Coach Ang Peng Siong watches Theresa's strokes
closely during a training session in Beijing.
ST Photo: Sim Chi Yin

Mr Ang, a former champion swimmer who competed in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics and was head coach at the 2000 Games, said then: 'It was a real humbling experience. The Paralympics remind us of what sports is really about - challenging the human spirit. We have a lot to learn from disabled athletes. Sometimes, we, able-bodied people, are ourselves disabled - mentally."

How right he was, I thought to myself, watching and photographing Singapore Paralympic wheelchair racer Eric Ting – who is paralysed from the chest down - go through the paces in the gym late last week. With no abdominal muscles to keep his body from jerking forward like a puppet, his coach pressed his chest against the wall while Eric pumped away at the weights machine, struggling to grip the handlebars with his stiff fingers.

Eric trains with his coach in Beijing.
ST Photo: Sim Chi Yin

My own gym workouts will never be the same again.