The "Other" Olympics- Gene Csakany

I’m going to write my blog entry on one of the presentations we heard in class last week.  Both of them were very informative and interesting, but the one about the handicapped Olympics really stood out.  We spoke about sports and athletic “fairness” and how it relates to males and females.  We also briefly did touch on handicapped athletes this semester, but we rarely spoke on how unfair what they go through is.  When thinking about women’s or men's professional sports there is obviously a disparity in viewership, publicity, marketing and revenue.  But that gap is widened when speaking about any sport that has a handicapped athlete, especially the Olympics.  When speaking on the Olympics, there are obviously some sports that get more publicity than others, but that is just mostly based on popularity of the sport itself, rarely just based on gender.  When the Olympics come around, people more or less have a sense of national pride and watch most of the events at least once regardless of gender.  For example, the women’s swimming team and soccer team were just as popular, if not more popular in this past summer Olympics than their male counterparts.  Once we talk about any events in the handicapped Olympics, it basically becomes irrelevant to us.  But when asked the question do we support it, or do we think it’s truly amazing that handicapped individuals are given the chance to compete, we all say yes.  Clearly that is not the case because how many of us could really say we knew about the “other” Olympics occurring this summer?  How many could say they would have shown the national pride, and support those competing for America?  The revenue, ticket sale, sponsorships and publicity are simply not readily present in the Handicapped Olympics; so when talking about the disparity amongst race, or gender, I think we need to think about how difficult it is simply to try to compete while being handicapped.