Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 5830 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
CALENDAR SPECIAL: THE WHEELCHAIR OLYMPIANS | 1983 | 1983-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Colour Sound: Sound Duration: 25 mins 16 secs Credits: Director - Graham Wetherell Producer - Graham Ironside Presenter - Roger Greenwood Yorkshire Television Subject: Sport |
Summary This is a Calendar Special on the British paraplegic athletic squad in training for the National Championships taking place later that year at Stoke Mandeville. The programme includes footage of the athletes in training, mainly wheelchair racing, at Cleckheaton athletics track in West Yorkshire. There are interviews with competitors and others in ... |
Description
This is a Calendar Special on the British paraplegic athletic squad in training for the National Championships taking place later that year at Stoke Mandeville. The programme includes footage of the athletes in training, mainly wheelchair racing, at Cleckheaton athletics track in West Yorkshire. There are interviews with competitors and others including Kevia McNicholas, Paul Cartwright, Moira Gallagher (National Track Coach), Mark Agar (British Record Holder 800/1500 meters) and Dorothy...
This is a Calendar Special on the British paraplegic athletic squad in training for the National Championships taking place later that year at Stoke Mandeville. The programme includes footage of the athletes in training, mainly wheelchair racing, at Cleckheaton athletics track in West Yorkshire. There are interviews with competitors and others including Kevia McNicholas, Paul Cartwright, Moira Gallagher (National Track Coach), Mark Agar (British Record Holder 800/1500 meters) and Dorothy Ripley (British Record Holder, shot put and javelin).
Title – The Wheelchair Olympians
The film begins with Kevan McNicholas explaining that as a result of a motorbike accident aged 23 he would never walk again. He states that he used to play rugby (for Wakefield Trinity Colts) and that doing training for competition gave him an aim. McNicholas wants to be the best, and he and his fellow wheelchair competitors race around the track in a relay at Cleckheaton. They are part of the British paraplegic athletic squad in training for National Championships later that year at Stoke Mandeville. McNicholas says that the athletes should be as recognised as Seb Coe or Steve Ovett. Another wheelchair user states that before his accident he used to enjoy playing team games but never realised his potential, whereas now he is near his full potential.
Roger Ellis (National Field Events Coach) talks about the nature of their training. Another wheelchair user, 18 year old Paul Cartwright from Batley, has been unable to walk from birth. He explains how he used to keep away from others with disabilities because he didn’t want to be classed as disabled. He used to participate alongside his fellow school mates in an ordinary school. He explains that on one occasion in a race he got beat, vowed to do better, and in the next year won the race. He is a Class 4 paraplegic, with no power in his legs. He is the fastest sprinter in Britain in his class, doing a time of 18.8 seconds for the 100 meters, with a world record of 17.2.
There is more film of the squad training at Cleckheaton. The squad is looking to be selected for the 1984 Paralympics in Illinois, and the five classes of disability classification is explained. There is an interview with Moira Gallagher, the newly appointed national track coach for the team. She is accompanied by Peter Carruthers (British Pentathlon Champion.) Moira had been a teacher at Grafton Special School in Leeds and was now Britain’s first national track coach. She says that the wheelchairs that the competitors are using are not good enough, and she is introducing a number of changes to the sport. She is joined by Nick Whitehead, former sprinter, and now Great Britain Athletics Team Manager.
The competitors do 10 repetition sprints. Then Mark Agar, the British Record Holder 800/1500 meters, is interviewed. Asked about what motivates him, he answers that he enjoys it and has kept it up since school. Asked about pain, he says that sometimes the stomach and shoulders can hurt. He then talks about his new wheelchair, comparing it to older ones. Again the competitors are filmed racing around the track, this time all together.
[advert break]
Another wheelchair competitor says that he gets mad about the different way that they get treated compared to other athletes. He says that he is sickened by something relating to the marathon – presumably referring to controversy over this at the forthcoming games in Illinois (which never took place). Roger Ellis talks about how much more difficult it is getting sponsorship for disabled athletes. The first two of ten new bespoke wheelchairs are seen, at a cost of £350 each. The money is provided by Clark’s Brewery in Wakefield and Modern Maintenance Products of Harrogate. The seats are made by Alpha Plastics of Hull.
Back at the track a discus and a javelin thrower practice. Joslyn Hoyte-Smith runs around track in the background. Good humour is in evidence among the competitors.
They make their way into the gym at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield for weight training. The hospital is renowned for its spinal injuries unit. Kevan McNicholas, who regained his consciousness in the unit after his accident, states that competing makes it, “A damn sight easier.” As he has his arm exercised, and goes on to talk about his experience of people standing away from him and talking about him as if he isn’t there.
Dorothy Ripley, the British record holder for shot put and javelin, is interviewed. She is asked about what motivates her, answering that she enjoys it. She has just made a world record throw, but she says that she is aiming for a Class 4 distance as she may be reclassified. Then Les Johns, 22 from Hemsworth, near Pontefract, is interviewed. He is being helped by a student from Carnegie, who is also a javelin thrower.
Paul Cartwright states that disabled athletics is not given the status it deserves and hardly any coverage on television. He speculates that perhaps people don’t like watching because they may find it upsetting. He wants to help the sport gain more recognition. Nick Whitehead is interviewed again, and Paul Cartwright talks about the beneficial effects of racing as he watches abled bodied runners pass by before heading off down the street, stating that he wants to win a gold medal. It comes to an end without any credits.
[Credits from ITN Source]
Director - Graham Wetherell
Producer - Graham Ironside
Presenter - Roger Greenwood
Yorkshire Television
Context
This film is a 1983 Calendar Special, focusing on athletes who are wheelchair users preparing for the Summer Olympics. Calendar was a regional news and current affairs programme covering Yorkshire and the surrounding regions, produced by ITV Yorkshire. Yorkshire Television, as the network was first called, was launched in 1968 out of a brand new studio at Kirkstall Road, Leeds. The station’s first broadcast was of a live test match between England and Australia which was being played just up...
This film is a 1983 Calendar Special, focusing on athletes who are wheelchair users preparing for the Summer Olympics. Calendar was a regional news and current affairs programme covering Yorkshire and the surrounding regions, produced by ITV Yorkshire. Yorkshire Television, as the network was first called, was launched in 1968 out of a brand new studio at Kirkstall Road, Leeds. The station’s first broadcast was of a live test match between England and Australia which was being played just up the road at Headingley. ITV Yorkshire broke a lot of new ground in its early days. It was the home to Britain’s first breakfast programme, and was the first terrestrial station to have round-the-clock broadcasting. Yorkshire Television has always had a very strong regional identity, adopting the famous Yorkshire folk song “Ilkley Moor Baht’ at” as its jingle between 1968 and 1989 and again 1996 – 2002.
The 1984 summer Paralympic games were the seventh Paralympic games to be held, the first was at Rome in 1960. The 1984 games consisted of two separate competitions, the one featured in this film at Stoke Mandeville and the other was at Long Island, New York, USA. The British Paralympic team had a fantastic year in 1984, winning a total of 331 medals and being second in the medal table only to the other host nation, the USA. Stoke Mandeville’s first director, Ludwig Guttmann, broke new ground with his innovative rehabilitation programme in the 1940s. The German neurosurgeon discovered that sport could play a huge part in the convalescence of his patients who had been injured during the Second World War. Starting with activities like darts, skittles and snooker and eventually games of wheelchair polo, netball and archery. In 1944, a competitive “dressing exercise” took place at the hospital. It was a simple exercise: men staying on ward that had been injured in the war would race each other from bed, into clothes and finally into their wheelchairs. On the opening day of the London Olympics in 1948, Guttman organised an archery competition between his Stoke Mandeville patients and injured war veterans from the Star and Garter home in Richmond. This was the pre-cursor to the Paralympic games we know and love today, and by 1950 the games held at the hospital attracted 10,000 spectators. By this point, the games weren’t restricted to the war-injured; it welcomed competitors with injuries from industrial accidents too. By 1952 the games had gone international. Today, the games do not have the goal of medical rehabilitation; rather to celebrate the athlete’s skill in the same way as the Olympics. By 1980 the games had their own official governing body and after a lot of hard work and lobbying, the Paralympic games were finally considered to be equal (or ‘parallel’ – giving the games its name) to the Olympic Games in 1988, with Seoul being the first to agree to host both games. This rule became official in 2001, and now potential host nations must bid for both. The 1984 games where divided into five categories; amputee, cerebral palsy, visually impaired, wheelchair and les autres – meaning the others and refers to competitors whose disability does not fit into these other categories. In this instance, the wheelchair category was specifically for those who had a spinal cord injury, although some competitors in the amputee and cerebral palsy categories used wheelchairs too. As with the summer Olympics, the Soviet Union, plus 14 of their eastern blocs and communist allies, boycotted the 1984 Paralympics. It is thought that this was revenge for the 1980 Moscow Olympics which were boycotted by the USA – itself a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. There are two games that are unique to the Paralympics, Goalball and boccia. The object of Goalball is to get a ball into the opposing teams net. Goalball is played by blind or visually impaired athletes. Boccia is played by athletes with various motor disabilities, and the goal is to roll, throw or kick a ball as close as possible to a target. Some Paralympic athletes require an assistant, for example a “tapper” is someone that lets a blind swimmer know when they are reaching the end of the pool by tapping the athlete gently with a special stick. Runners with visual impairments can also have a guide, who is attached to the athlete by a rope and guides them along the course. The guide talks the athlete through the race, while running alongside them and giving them instructions and generally acting as their eyes. The Paralympics have a bright future; with next hosts Tokyo to add two more competitions, badminton and taekwondo to their games in 2020. The 2016 games in Rio were the second most attended in history, with a sell-out crowd of 167, 675 on Saturday 10th September, beating the busiest day of the Olympics that year by ten thousand. References: Disability and Sport: The Birth of the Paralympics - from Rehabilitation to World Class Performance Paralympics: 10 things you need to know Rio 2016 is the second-most attended Paralympic Games in history, The Guardian |