to wonder why America is not doing so great at the Paralympics?

[BegoniaBampot]

why are they lagging down the medals table? Surprised that China is doing so well and seem to take these sports seriously. What's the deal with the US I wonder, do they not see them as that important?

I've thought about this and figured it must be because of the health care system. There is probably not as much in the way of rehabilitation and it isn't as recognised as being worth the funding

I think there is a lot about the US and their health care or lack of for certain that we don't get to see

To be a little flippant about it, they have lots of people in the armed forces off in places like Afghanistan, so they should have a good stock of fit, physical, active people with missing parts.

SO I can only conclude that they don't look after them very well when they get back, or encourage/enable them to go into sports.

I heard an interview with someone from team USA, i think he was basically saying they are struggling because the individual disabled sports are run by different governing bodies in the US rather than anyone having overall control - and those individual organisations don't always run everything to Olympic standards/rules (he pointed out they don't even use the Olympic names for sports).

THe US team is Huge though maybe the other teams are just better than they are, thinking about it it isnt as though they didnt send a team

To go back to the point about China having massive state-funded athlete training facilities, hence their dominance of the medal tables - I absolutely get that in relation to able-bodied sports, but in relation to sportspeople with disabilities?

My general impression is that China's attitude (to generalise hugely, mainly from friends' experiences of adoption from Chinese orphanages, which are full of children with various forms of disability) to disability is very backward - would they really be pumping funds into disabled sport?

We were a bit confused about that peevish I don't know really but china is doing amazing maybe it is a reflection on the country is getting better, or their disabled athletes are living in disabled communities (homes/hospitals) and they do their training there china is obviously funding them though perhaps it isn't as bad as they once were,

Peevish, they must be, or they wouldnt be so successful.

The impression that I get, although I acknowledge that I know vey little bout it and could well be wrong, is that China pumps money into people who have got a chance of winning, but very little into everyone else.

Sadly the American dream has no subsection for disabled people

Funding is definitely an issue, but there's also the structural training set up for sports in the States. For many sports, especially athletics, swimming and gymnastics, training goes through universities. People get their leg up into professional sports by getting a sports scholarship at university from where they compete with peers and get spotted for national teams and funding from sponsors. This structure hasn't adapted to parasports (yet).

Well my first thought was that in America, feeling any support, empathy or sympathy towards a disabled person is regarded as being one step away from Communism, but that would be America-bashing.

So I guess we will stick with the lack of funding as the reason.

I was listening to a discussion on 5live about this. They cited the reason for china doing so well as being related to them hosting the Olympics, in that they showed a commitment pre-bid and then ramped it up for when they hosted, now they probably just enjoy winning. They mentioned that there was now a big influx of Ukraine althetes as they are preparing to bid for 2024.

The comparative lack of success is down to profile, infrastructure and funding, although they did mention that disabled althetes do get sports scholarships for university so I don't think it's a case of complete neglect.

I mean lack of success for the USA team btw

That's a good point furry. It's a shame Smerica didn't have the same attitude when they got the Olympics in Atlanta though.

that's why I'm surprised about China, I wouldn't have thought that they would have put so much time and money into disabled athletes. Maybe as someone said it's partly because they hosted it last time and had to step up. Wonder if we would have been getting so interested and having this discussion if the games weren't being held in the UK with the massive media coverage it's getting.

And another thing, most of the sports (Olympics or Para-) are sports that Americans don't really care about and not many people play. (I had to look up several Paralympic sports, as I'd never heard of them before.) If you took away the swimming and track and field (I guess I mean athletics, don't I) medals from the regular Olympics, we'd have a pretty non-impressive medal count. And even those sports don't have much presence on the average American's radar after the Olympics are done. Right after the Olympics, they showed a Diamond League athletics meet here, and it was shown during the day after it happened, and the entire meet was chopped and edited into an hour of coverage.