The lives of people with disabilities are not fair.
In any field - in employment, education, relationships and livelihoods, competition is unfair.
Prejudices, exclusion and perception gaps are still the key players in the life of people with disabilities.
In this sense, the Paralympic sport is a unique achievement environment - although it is a super-competitive environment, it is also fair.
Men and women with disabilities, who face men and women with similar disabilities, with a very organized system of classification, whose job is to make sure that competition, no matter how fierce, is fair.
We see it well almost every day here at the ILAN Spivak Sports Club, and we see it immediately in the light of the eyes of a child with a disability who is sitting in a wheelchair for the first time, joining a basketball practice with other children in wheelchairs.
Years of embarrassment, of a sense of inability in front of his teammates, of a distorted sense of worth - dissipate all at once on the field.
For the first time in his life, the competition is fair.
If you look closely, you can see the child, in a real place - growing up.
physically.
The chest straightens, the drooping shoulders straighten, the head rises.
Mark Millier,
It is difficult to overstate the achievements of the Israeli Paralympic delegation to the Tokyo Games, especially the exceptional swimmers of Yaakov Beninson at the ILAN Haifa Sports Club. It is also difficult to separate the achievements of athletes from the context of their lives Sportiness and personality, on the way to the heart of the Israeli public consensus.
The Tokyo Games mark a generational change in Paralympic sports, after years of relative drought: the achievements of the young swimmers from Haifa join the wheelchair basketball reserve team, which won a historic medal at the European Championships for the first time this year;
To the wheelchair tennis players from the ILAN "Spivak" RJ club, who continue to climb in the world rankings and are already kissing the top twenty in the world;
And the joint goal ball teams of the IDF disabled and a blind school.
The current exposure and successes of the Paralympic athletes are an extraordinary opportunity to talk about sports as a powerful engine for "normalizing" disabilities, as well as the Paralympic sports - which offer people with disabilities the opportunity for fair competition in an unfair world.
Maybe this is our chance to make the world a little fairer, even off the sports field.
The author is the director of the Spilak Sports Center for the Disabled of the ILAN Association, a silver medalist at the Paralympic Games in wheelchair tennis.
Ami Dadon,
