Have you ever watched a sport you love and desperately wanted to mute your TV? For every Joe Buck or Mike Breen, there’s a metric ton of blowhards, constantly drowning viewers in mediocre anecdotes, dire mispronunciations, gaps in knowledge, and poor feel for the moment. But pro sports aren’t the only spaces where the commentary team might make you want to slam your head into a wall. In Paralympic sport, complicated, often obscure competitions—some of which make dressage seem like it has the viewership of the NFL in comparison—battle with societal perceptions and a lack of investment. The result is a commentary landscape that is filled with inexperience, errors, bias, and frustration.
Does it have to be this way? With the start of the 2024 Paralympics this week, here’s an examination of some reasons why para-sport announcing tends to fail to clear all the hurdles—often the very first one.
The money (or lack of it)
Many of the people doing para-sport commentary below the Paralympic level are paying their own way, for what’s often a volunteer gig to gain experience while helping grow the sport. Dylan Cummings, one of the up-and-coming talents in wheelchair basketball commentary, plies his trade at a number of high-level wheelchair basketball tournaments, including international club competitions. That means paying for his own travel and lodging while negotiating with the host clubs to see what costs he can recoup.
“I’m very much aware of the financial pressures on that club, so what I ask for would depend on my relationship with that club,” Cummings said. “If I’ve worked with them before, or if I've known them a long time, I would maybe ask for my expenses to be covered. Sometimes, if I know, if that's not possible, I would just go there and do it voluntarily.”
The majority of funding available to Paralympic sports is not at the club level, but at the national level. Professional para-sport athletes—and pro leagues—are a relatively new invention. A select few sports, like wheelchair basketball, have leagues in Europe. However, the vast majority of athletes (and their teams) are as close to broke as you can get. Hiring quality announcers is pretty low on their list of priorities.
And while day-to-day media coverage is growing, many of the Paralympic stories are being told by the governing bodies themselves rather than independent reporters. As a result, much of the commentary in sports like wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby—two prime candidates for audience growth—are taken on at the lower levels by local PR staffers or former athletes. Commentary duties for international events are handled by the IPC or their federations. In many cases this leaves inexperienced commentators being forced to broadcast solo at an important tournament, as we saw with the recent last-chance qualifiers in women’s wheelchair basketball.
What does that lead to? A mess. A mess that Chris Hockman, a regular commentator for both able-bodied and adapted sport, says should be rectified by the IPC.
“No one gets into para-sport for the money because if you did, you'd have negative money,” Hockman told me. “The IPC pays people to do the Paralympics, and I don't know if they're always getting their money's worth out of that. At the very least, they're going to fly all these people out, put them in hotels. This year, it's a free trip to Paris. Who's not going to jump at that any time of year?”
Some of those eager visitors might be calling a sport for the first time, and are desperately cramming for it even as we speak.
Lest para-sport media members come across as bitter and twisted mic-holders, it’s worth noting that changes are slowly being made. The U.K.’s Channel 4, arguably the world leader in para-sport coverage since London 2012, has committed to a large portion of their broadcast team for the Paralympics being disabled. Stateside, NBC has announced record-breaking levels of coverage, though it is worth noting that while big headlines are easy and cheap, following through is neither.
The sports themselves
Folks involved in the space acknowledge that para-sport can be difficult to convey to a casual audience.
“I think the hardest thing in para-sport, apart from not being a condescending dickhead and making it all about what an inspirational story it is, is making it accessible,” Hockman said.
Why is that? For one, there’s the sports themselves and how well they translate to the uninitiated viewer. The majority of track and field events, for example, have a fairly standard able-bodied equivalent, ditto with swimming, and—to an extent—wheelchair basketball, where the only significantly changed rule is that you can double-dribble. While it may require some knowledge to explain why wheelchair track athletes are so much faster than their able-bodied counterparts over medium and long distances, it’s not hard to understand that the athletes need to get from point A to point B.
There are, however, para-sport unicorns like wheelchair rugby, boccia, and goalball—sports that you’d find it hard to drop a newbie straight into. Wheelchair rugby is a Frankenstinian concoction of basketball, hockey, and rugby. Boccia is like lawn bowling meets curling. In 20-plus years of being in and around para-sport, I’ve yet to come up with an apt comparison for goalball, though it’s the sport I find first-time Paralympic watchers are most often transfixed by. Ask someone inexperienced to call those sports, with their nuanced and often confusing rules, and you’re setting them up for disaster.
Secondly, classification—the system that aims at creating a level playing field for athletes with wildly varying types of disabilities—is a minefield at the best of times. Essentially, the International Paralympic Committee has a set of what are called “eligible impairments.” That’s the first step: deciding who can and can’t compete. Then, most sports have their own classifications based on an athlete’s functional ability. In most team sports that classification corresponds to a point value, with a maximum number of points allowed on the floor at any one time. A few sports, like the skiing events at the Winter Games, use a time factor system so that athletes with a wide range of disabilities can race against each other. Some sports, like para (formerly sledge) hockey have an “in or out” system, while others split their athletes into different divisions. This is why you see so many different swimming events—and a fair amount of scandals.
Confused yet? So are seasoned commentators, not least of all because there’s a lack of research for them to draw upon. This is difficult enough for those who have spent years around the game, like Cummings, let alone someone who has been parachuted into Paris. To cover Paralympic stories in the past, I’ve had to dig up the official match logs using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine just to find the score of a group-stage game. Not exactly conducive to good commentary.
“You do have to look through players’ social medias, find out where they're from, where they grew up,” Cummings said. “You do have to dig a little deeper to find out that extra information.”
Finding a fix
One of the interesting dynamics of para-sport, which might hold the key to improved commentary, is that some organizations and administrators have grown closer to their able-bodied counterparts. Over the last decade, many major national Paralympic and Olympic Committees have merged—like the USOPC—and, at a federation level, some sports are now administered by the same groups as their Olympic equivalents.
Hockman thinks this collaboration can help improve the broadcasting skills of those calling either discipline. “I think things are getting better,” he said. “I think swimming is where things are starting to improve because we're seeing more swimming para-events in non-para meets.”
And because of advertising dollars, viewership matters. Hockman says that—ideally—additional exposure for the para-events, such as shared meets, could trickle down into a more robust commentary ecosystem. “I think a lot of times sport reflects society, and so as we've seen more exposure of disability, we see more exposure of the Paralympic Games,” he said. “As we see more inclusion in society, we see more inclusion in sport.”
But until then, the most devoted para-sport broadcasters will keep scraping together pennies, keep calling the events they can afford to call, and keep sitting at home for the ones they can’t—perhaps missing a chance to grow the games for a new audience.
“If somebody were able to give me a teleporter so I could just teleport to Spain, do a game, and then teleport back home, so I don't have to pay for any hotels,” Cummings mused when asked for his dream scenario. ”Traveling with a disability is difficult, but I do it because I love the game and I wouldn't do what I do if I didn't love the game.”
Somewhere in the middle lies a happier medium, one where announcers have the support and the skills to give the Paralympics the informed, capable commentary they deserve. Here’s hoping that’s on display in Paris.
