Highlights From the Tokyo Paralympics Opening Ceremony
TOKYO — There were clowns, acrobats and the hopeful theme “We Have Wings,” to evoke all that is possible in difficult circumstances.
Yet the Paralympic Games got underway Tuesday much like the Olympics a few weeks before: with no spectators watching from the stands, a sparse gathering of athletes and questions around holding a large event in a pandemic.
A team made up of refugees led the parade of athletes and a volunteer marched with the flag of Afghanistan; its two Paralympians are not at the Games because of the upheaval in the country.
Still, organizers of the Games have said that the event is more than a sports competition, casting it as a way to draw attention to the 15 percent of the global population with impairments.
“This is the only global event that puts people with disabilities at center stage and gives voice to persons with disabilities,” Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, said at a news conference Monday. “Throughout the pandemic, they have been left behind and have been denied a level of services that nondisabled people have had access to.”
Generating attention for the Games, which are opening a little over two weeks after the Olympics closing ceremony, could be a challenge, particularly in Japan, where a persistent wave of coronavirus infections has burdened the hospital system in Tokyo and unnerved the public.
Outside the Olympic Stadium before the ceremony on Tuesday, there were noticeably fewer people than before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, when throngs of people gathered to take selfies along the road around the stadium. On Tuesday, a line of about 10 people pointed their cellphones at the venue. The low turnout may be partly because the Paralympic ceremony landed on a weekday, while the opening ceremony of the Olympics took place on a Friday night, and the closing festivities on a Sunday.
Hanako Ohkawa, 34, appreciated the lack of crowds. She brought her two daughters, 4 and 6, to the stadium. They were wearing hats with Olympic and Paralympic mascots on them.
“We didn’t come on the day of the opening ceremony for the Olympics, because we thought there would be too many people,” Ohkawa said. She said she was worried about the spread of the coronavirus in Tokyo, “but since the Olympics have happened, there is not much they can do about it now. They can’t cancel the Paralympics or else that would be quite unfair.”
The first team to enter the stadium on Tuesday was the Refugee Paralympic Team, which is making its second appearance in the Games.
Both flag bearers have deep significance. Alia Issa, who was born in Greece after her family fled Syria, is the first woman on a refugee team at the Paralympics. She will compete in the club throw event in track and field.
Abbas Karimi, a swimmer and a refugee who has lived in the United States since 2016, will be the only Afghan athlete at the Games. The athletes who were scheduled to compete for the country withdrew from the Games because they could not secure safe flights to Tokyo amid the chaos of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Karimi has lived and trained in Portland, Ore., and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. He will be swimming the 50-meter backstroke and 50-meter butterfly.
One of the two athletes representing Afghanistan, Zakia Khudadadi, a taekwondo athlete, had released a video from Kabul pleading for help last week. She would have been the first Afghan woman to participate in the Games. She was among a group of female athletes transported to Australia; the location of the other team member, Hossain Rasouli, a track athlete, was not clear.
The emperor of Japan, Naruhito, officially declared the Games open. Japan’s Imperial family has a long history of support for the Paralympics: The current emperor’s parents, Emperor Emeritus Akihito and Empress Emerita Michiko, adopted the 1964 Paralympics in Tokyo as one of their primary causes when they were crown prince and princess. Tokyo is the first city to host the Paralympics twice, as the Games, first held in 1960 in Rome, are held in the same city as their Olympic counterpart.
The support of the then-crown prince and princess started a gradual change in attitudes toward those with disabilities in Japan, said Kenneth J. Ruoff, a historian and specialist in Imperial Japan at Portland State University.
“However hard it may be to believe now, there were sayings at the time that people with disabilities should be essentially kept out of sight or hidden,” Professor Ruoff said.
At the time the royal family had a strong social influence, Ruoff added, and the crown prince helped shift public opinion through his view that people with disabilities “should play sports for the same purpose that everyone else did, which included first and foremost enjoyment and not just rehabilitation.”
After the 1964 Paralympics, the Imperial couple regularly visited hospitals and institutions where those with disabilities lived.
“The emperor and empress resolutely, over decades, kept drawing attention to people with disabilities by visiting them with the media in tow,” Ruoff said.
Five countries sent athletes to the Paralympics, which has 22 sports, for the first time this year: Bhutan, Grenada, the Maldives, Paraguay and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
A total of 21 countries decided not to participate this year. Reasons included pandemic travel restrictions, not having an athlete who qualified for the Games and pregnancy.
A total of 162 nations and a delegation of refugees are taking part in the Paralympics in Tokyo. That’s more than went to the Rio Games in 2016 and just shy of the record 164 in London in 2012.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/24/sports/paralympic-opening-ceremony/