Paris Paralympics
Very belatedly as I have NOT had the time or energy this week, a brief review of the always-awesome Paralympics!
~ My mind tends to wander during the looooonnnnng opening ceremony speeches, so it wasn't until The Last Leg showed a clip from Andrew Parsons' speech that I noticed a U2 lyric had been snuck in again ("We are one, but we are not the same") - likely to be the handiwork of Craig Spence who included an Invisible lyric in the Rio opening ceremony. Then during the closing ceremony he mentioned "the city of blinding lights" and I was like, wait a minute, does he do this EVERY time and I just haven't picked up on it? And shortly after I was wondering that, it came up on The Last Leg, with confirmation that there HAVE been a bunch of other examples I missed - the closing ceremony also had a reference to Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way (which did feel vaguely familiar at the time but it didn't quite register that it was from a U2 song), and there have apparently been lines from MLK and Crazy Tonight in past speeches!! I'm gonna have to pay more attention in future - I didn't realise U2 Bingo was a regular Paralympic event. *g*
~ Just when I had finally got the Olympics medal ceremony music out of my head, I was dismayed to find they were using it for the Paras as well - I was really hoping for a different tune! By the end of the second week it was not only stuck in my head but I kept having actual auditory hallucinations that I could hear it playing, even when I had no streams open anywhere - that's never happened to me before!!
~ Channel 4 didn't have a dedicated Paralympics player this time around, instead opting to just use YouTube as they did for the last Winter Paras in 2022. This has its pros and cons... YouTube is of course a very stable platform so I wasn't plagued with technical problems like in Tokyo, and it auto-saves all the streams once they've finished, so no worries about missing anything you didn't see live. Commentary (where available) doesn't need to be switched on like with Eurosport Player, though you also can't switch it OFF for medal ceremonies! As noted in Beijing, you get to see how many people are watching each stream (it's a bit depressing that it was only a few hundred most of the time), and the live chat feature was enabled so you could also see people reacting to stuff as it happened, which was nice. YouTube unfortunately doesn't have a 10-second rewind feature so it was a bit fiddly if I needed to skip backwards, but at least it worked smoothly and didn't keep buffering like Eurosport did this year. The only real pain in the arse was that YouTube doesn't provide any way of organising the streams so you can find the sport you want or the live and upcoming events - it just had the entire week-and-a-half's worth of streams on one page and you had to scroll AAAAALLLLLLLL the way down to find the right one. (At least this got easier as the Games progressed and the current ones were nearer the top!) Overall it was a much better experience than using that bloody Tokyo player, so I think this is definitely the way forward. (Much better than the dreadful TV coverage, too - online it was totally uninterrupted, with no adverts apart from two sponsor bumpers when you first opened the stream.)
~ The Paralympics website was just as functional as the Olympics one this time, which was good to see (and I think they even fixed a couple of the bugs I mentioned last month). I will say it would've been reeeealllly helpful to have medal ceremony times included in the published schedules, as I recall they were on at least one previous occasion (not sure which Games it was).
~ It's so great that they're FINALLY broadcasting every sport, after all the frustration of missing stuff at the last few Games. (There's still some way to go before we have the same complete coverage as the Olympics, though - the sports with multiple courts only had one or two streams, so you're out of luck if GB are playing on a different one, and for some unclear reason there was no volleyball stream for the first three days. Which didn't stop Clare Balding telling us we could watch it on the first evening!) This was the first time I got to see the para taekwondo and I think also the wheelchair fencing, which was surprisingly awesome (maybe more exciting than the able-bodied version as they can't run away, so they need super-quick reactions). Nice to have some GB interest in the fencing after we didn't have anyone at the Olympics this year.
~ Some of the scheduling and/or running of the Paralympics seemed a bit incompetent, as there were unexplained massive delays at times. The fencing was running several hours behind on the first day, but was pretty much bang on schedule thereafter - no idea what the issue was!
~ Archie Atkinson was cursed by the commentator in his pursuit race - he nearly caught his opponent so was nailed on for the gold medal with a lap to go, and the guy said something like "As long as he stays upright he'll win the gold", so of course he promptly crashed out!!
~ I'm still absolutely loving the goalball. Maybe the only sport where a penalty is conceded because no-one could find the ball!! Fabulous Türkiye won the women's again, while the men's final went to overtime with a golden goal, which I hadn't seen before. Japan were the eventual winners, which felt like a fitting end after I was disappointed for them narrowly losing the first group match of this Paralympics!
~ Two GB athletes reached the women's archery bronze match and it was soooo close - Phoebe led all the way through until she choked on the very last arrow and Jodie won it! (The latter was possibly our most badass team member, performing brilliantly without a hint of nerves to win team gold a couple of days later, and not even getting distracted by her seven-month-old foetus making its presence felt!!)
~ We managed to win an unprecedented 12 gold medals in one day!! I think the sheer number of medals we accumulate is another thing that makes the Paralympics even more fun than the Olympics.
~ Kadeena, Jaco & Jody successfully defended their team sprint title - Team Awesome rides again!! I was especially pleased for Kadeena after her disaster in the time trial. (She would've been fine if they hadn't introduced a pointless qualifying round this year - in the past it was just a single run, and she was great in the first one!)
~ Gotta love those unexpected victories, like Louise Fiddes winning gold out of nowhere in the swimming - I hadn't been expecting ANY medal in that final based on the qualifying times, so that was very exciting, and she looked as shocked as everyone else was!
~ So excited to see Sammi Kinghorn win a surprise 100m gold after two silvers earlier in the week - I was jumping up and down shouting encouragement at the telly!
~ Alice Tai was another Poole athlete absolutely smashing it in Paris, with five medals including two gold! 8) (She looked like she was gonna win another gold by miles, but ran out of steam at the end and had to settle for bronze that time!)
~ Dan Pembroke was INCREDIBLE in the javelin - won gold by miles, smashed the world record and then did it again with his next throw!!
~ Ben Sandilands also won a brilliant 1500m gold with a new world record!
~ Sarah Storey won her 18th and 19th(!!) gold medals - the road race was especially thrilling as she won it by about a tyre width! (There was a similar sprint finish with Fin Graham taking gold in one of the men's races.)
~ Pleased to have a ton of GB canoe sprinters here, after having none at all for the Olympics! (And they did very well indeed.)
~ Alfie Hewett & Gordon Reid winning their first doubles gold was a lovely moment. Shame Alfie couldn't repeat it in the singles final despite having a match point!
~ Libby Clegg has retired so our mixed relay Team Awesome from Tokyo is no more, but Jonnie & Ali were this time joined by Zac Shaw and Sammi Kinghorn. I was only expecting a bronze as we qualified third fastest, but we went faster in the final while the USA went slower (having unwisely changed a runner), so we actually got silver again! I wonder if Sammi's gonna show off her huge medal haul on Countryfile at some point. *g*
~ The women's prosthetic 100m was very dramatic, as the Italian tripped while racing for gold and took out her teammate in the next lane (who was still credited as finishing the race as she skidded across the line). I was so focused on watching replays to see what had happened that I initially failed to notice our own Didi Okoh had somehow ended up winning the bronze - I'd already written her off as she was miles back in 5th, but after the collision she crossed the line fractions of a second before the Italian fell over it!!
~ Shout-out to Bournemouth canoe sprinter Jack Eyers who won silver on the final day!
~ I found the opening ceremony a little dull TBH, but the closing ceremony was much more fun - you don't often see a military band playing (and singing) Gloria Gaynor! (Also it was a good idea to get the athletes into the stadium before it started, as their entrance took forever at the Olympics.) Enjoyed the handover to LA - when can we expect para skateboarding to join the schedule?! Unfortunately, just as the party was getting started with the dance music they'd spent all evening hyping up, Channel 4 inexplicably ended their coverage of the ceremony with about an hour of it still to go, so we barely got to hear any of the entertainment and weren't allowed any sense of closure. For some reason they'd decided to put The Last Leg on an hour earlier than billed, to make way for an episode of Gogglebox?! What the actual fuck??? I cannot believe they did that, or even begin to fathom why. Hope we didn't miss anything amazing!!
~ My mind tends to wander during the looooonnnnng opening ceremony speeches, so it wasn't until The Last Leg showed a clip from Andrew Parsons' speech that I noticed a U2 lyric had been snuck in again ("We are one, but we are not the same") - likely to be the handiwork of Craig Spence who included an Invisible lyric in the Rio opening ceremony. Then during the closing ceremony he mentioned "the city of blinding lights" and I was like, wait a minute, does he do this EVERY time and I just haven't picked up on it? And shortly after I was wondering that, it came up on The Last Leg, with confirmation that there HAVE been a bunch of other examples I missed - the closing ceremony also had a reference to Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way (which did feel vaguely familiar at the time but it didn't quite register that it was from a U2 song), and there have apparently been lines from MLK and Crazy Tonight in past speeches!! I'm gonna have to pay more attention in future - I didn't realise U2 Bingo was a regular Paralympic event. *g*
~ Just when I had finally got the Olympics medal ceremony music out of my head, I was dismayed to find they were using it for the Paras as well - I was really hoping for a different tune! By the end of the second week it was not only stuck in my head but I kept having actual auditory hallucinations that I could hear it playing, even when I had no streams open anywhere - that's never happened to me before!!
~ Channel 4 didn't have a dedicated Paralympics player this time around, instead opting to just use YouTube as they did for the last Winter Paras in 2022. This has its pros and cons... YouTube is of course a very stable platform so I wasn't plagued with technical problems like in Tokyo, and it auto-saves all the streams once they've finished, so no worries about missing anything you didn't see live. Commentary (where available) doesn't need to be switched on like with Eurosport Player, though you also can't switch it OFF for medal ceremonies! As noted in Beijing, you get to see how many people are watching each stream (it's a bit depressing that it was only a few hundred most of the time), and the live chat feature was enabled so you could also see people reacting to stuff as it happened, which was nice. YouTube unfortunately doesn't have a 10-second rewind feature so it was a bit fiddly if I needed to skip backwards, but at least it worked smoothly and didn't keep buffering like Eurosport did this year. The only real pain in the arse was that YouTube doesn't provide any way of organising the streams so you can find the sport you want or the live and upcoming events - it just had the entire week-and-a-half's worth of streams on one page and you had to scroll AAAAALLLLLLLL the way down to find the right one. (At least this got easier as the Games progressed and the current ones were nearer the top!) Overall it was a much better experience than using that bloody Tokyo player, so I think this is definitely the way forward. (Much better than the dreadful TV coverage, too - online it was totally uninterrupted, with no adverts apart from two sponsor bumpers when you first opened the stream.)
~ The Paralympics website was just as functional as the Olympics one this time, which was good to see (and I think they even fixed a couple of the bugs I mentioned last month). I will say it would've been reeeealllly helpful to have medal ceremony times included in the published schedules, as I recall they were on at least one previous occasion (not sure which Games it was).
~ It's so great that they're FINALLY broadcasting every sport, after all the frustration of missing stuff at the last few Games. (There's still some way to go before we have the same complete coverage as the Olympics, though - the sports with multiple courts only had one or two streams, so you're out of luck if GB are playing on a different one, and for some unclear reason there was no volleyball stream for the first three days. Which didn't stop Clare Balding telling us we could watch it on the first evening!) This was the first time I got to see the para taekwondo and I think also the wheelchair fencing, which was surprisingly awesome (maybe more exciting than the able-bodied version as they can't run away, so they need super-quick reactions). Nice to have some GB interest in the fencing after we didn't have anyone at the Olympics this year.
~ Some of the scheduling and/or running of the Paralympics seemed a bit incompetent, as there were unexplained massive delays at times. The fencing was running several hours behind on the first day, but was pretty much bang on schedule thereafter - no idea what the issue was!
~ Archie Atkinson was cursed by the commentator in his pursuit race - he nearly caught his opponent so was nailed on for the gold medal with a lap to go, and the guy said something like "As long as he stays upright he'll win the gold", so of course he promptly crashed out!!
~ I'm still absolutely loving the goalball. Maybe the only sport where a penalty is conceded because no-one could find the ball!! Fabulous Türkiye won the women's again, while the men's final went to overtime with a golden goal, which I hadn't seen before. Japan were the eventual winners, which felt like a fitting end after I was disappointed for them narrowly losing the first group match of this Paralympics!
~ Two GB athletes reached the women's archery bronze match and it was soooo close - Phoebe led all the way through until she choked on the very last arrow and Jodie won it! (The latter was possibly our most badass team member, performing brilliantly without a hint of nerves to win team gold a couple of days later, and not even getting distracted by her seven-month-old foetus making its presence felt!!)
~ We managed to win an unprecedented 12 gold medals in one day!! I think the sheer number of medals we accumulate is another thing that makes the Paralympics even more fun than the Olympics.
~ Kadeena, Jaco & Jody successfully defended their team sprint title - Team Awesome rides again!! I was especially pleased for Kadeena after her disaster in the time trial. (She would've been fine if they hadn't introduced a pointless qualifying round this year - in the past it was just a single run, and she was great in the first one!)
~ Gotta love those unexpected victories, like Louise Fiddes winning gold out of nowhere in the swimming - I hadn't been expecting ANY medal in that final based on the qualifying times, so that was very exciting, and she looked as shocked as everyone else was!
~ So excited to see Sammi Kinghorn win a surprise 100m gold after two silvers earlier in the week - I was jumping up and down shouting encouragement at the telly!
~ Alice Tai was another Poole athlete absolutely smashing it in Paris, with five medals including two gold! 8) (She looked like she was gonna win another gold by miles, but ran out of steam at the end and had to settle for bronze that time!)
~ Dan Pembroke was INCREDIBLE in the javelin - won gold by miles, smashed the world record and then did it again with his next throw!!
~ Ben Sandilands also won a brilliant 1500m gold with a new world record!
~ Sarah Storey won her 18th and 19th(!!) gold medals - the road race was especially thrilling as she won it by about a tyre width! (There was a similar sprint finish with Fin Graham taking gold in one of the men's races.)
~ Pleased to have a ton of GB canoe sprinters here, after having none at all for the Olympics! (And they did very well indeed.)
~ Alfie Hewett & Gordon Reid winning their first doubles gold was a lovely moment. Shame Alfie couldn't repeat it in the singles final despite having a match point!
~ Libby Clegg has retired so our mixed relay Team Awesome from Tokyo is no more, but Jonnie & Ali were this time joined by Zac Shaw and Sammi Kinghorn. I was only expecting a bronze as we qualified third fastest, but we went faster in the final while the USA went slower (having unwisely changed a runner), so we actually got silver again! I wonder if Sammi's gonna show off her huge medal haul on Countryfile at some point. *g*
~ The women's prosthetic 100m was very dramatic, as the Italian tripped while racing for gold and took out her teammate in the next lane (who was still credited as finishing the race as she skidded across the line). I was so focused on watching replays to see what had happened that I initially failed to notice our own Didi Okoh had somehow ended up winning the bronze - I'd already written her off as she was miles back in 5th, but after the collision she crossed the line fractions of a second before the Italian fell over it!!
~ Shout-out to Bournemouth canoe sprinter Jack Eyers who won silver on the final day!
~ I found the opening ceremony a little dull TBH, but the closing ceremony was much more fun - you don't often see a military band playing (and singing) Gloria Gaynor! (Also it was a good idea to get the athletes into the stadium before it started, as their entrance took forever at the Olympics.) Enjoyed the handover to LA - when can we expect para skateboarding to join the schedule?! Unfortunately, just as the party was getting started with the dance music they'd spent all evening hyping up, Channel 4 inexplicably ended their coverage of the ceremony with about an hour of it still to go, so we barely got to hear any of the entertainment and weren't allowed any sense of closure. For some reason they'd decided to put The Last Leg on an hour earlier than billed, to make way for an episode of Gogglebox?! What the actual fuck??? I cannot believe they did that, or even begin to fathom why. Hope we didn't miss anything amazing!!