Monthly Archive for September, 2016

The video of the Rio Paralympic Games presentation that has had millions of views is entitled “We’re The Superhumans“. Alvin Law, the Canadian drummer who plays in the video, thalidomide survivor, explains that the trailer “is not about disability but about the talent and skills that we all possess.”
It is not rhetorical to say that these athletes, who represent the world of disability in the most important sport event to which to participate,  are individuals to be admired as are Bolt and Phelps. They have to be admired in a world that, however, still tends to ignore and segregate people with this kind of diversity. In contrast, the Olympic sport is an example of how it can be achieved the personal empowerment through the development of skills and competences to gain control on own lives and improve the well being.
The Paralympic Games should provide an opportunity to raise awareness that sport and, more generally motor activity might represent situations in which to promote the psychosocial and motor development of persons with disabilities. The concept of empowerment in sport for people with disabilities has at its basis the development of awareness in their skills. The goal is therefore to achieve, through sport experience, a better control of personal resources and the environment in which we live, with the use of skills that are not usually held by persons with disabilities. In the empowerment perspective, the people with disabilities are considered as citizens who have rights and opportunity to choice, rather than dependent individuals, to help, to socialize and to which supply of skills.
It is full of these meanings “The letter to the normals who avoid my brother” by Giacomo Mazzariol, in which he says that “taught me that we all need help” citing the famous phrase of Einstein: “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, he will pass all its life to believe to be a stupid”.
We look at the Paralympics with this new spirit of discovery of a different way of living the skills and to adapt to situations, whether a ball, water or a running track. Let’s look also to improve ourselves, in the spirit of one who does not retreat thinking that sport and physical activity are not for us, but who wants to look for new ways to increase the well-being through the movement.