In September 2016, 4,350 Paralympic athletes will arrive in Rio de Janeiro to compete for medals across 23 different sports. The games in Rio have a lot to live up to. London’s 2012 Paralympics proved to be a magnet for sponsorship, and competitors have said that the crowds – and their enthusiasm – were unparalleled. But there’s another respect in which the 2012 games set the standard for future Paralympic tournaments: it made the host city itself more accessible.
In order to secure their bid for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games, organisers had to make two key promises to do with transport. One was to make public transport a key part of their sustainability agenda. The other was to make London 2012 more accessible than any previous games. London 2012 was planned as a public transport-driven games, and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) took action to maximise its usage.
The Challenges
To live up to their promises, the committee had to overcome a number of challenges. Parts of London’s transport system had to undergo a radical overhaul. The commitments also had major implications for venue design, equipment and even the workforce of the games. And because the idea of “legacy” was central to all of the preparations for the games, the solutions put in place needed to work over the long term – not just the main event.
When LOCOG started its work, disabled people’s confidence in using the public transport network was very low, so there was a need to change people’s perceptions through advertising. The demand from disabled people to attend the Paralympics was higher than expected, but organisers did not know what sort of mix of disabled spectators they needed to plan for. For example, while they knew that many groups of wheelchair users would be arriving, they did not know how many would be using electric wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs or scooters – each of which has different requirements for travel.
Finally, the transport system needed to be flexible enough to accommodate the extra short-term influx and diverse needs of disabled people, and revert back to more “standard” operations after the event. For a transport system first developed in the mid-1800s, these were no small demands.
