Global Comment

Worldwide voices on arts and culture

Opening Ceremony Shows That Paralympic Inspiration Porn Refuses to Die

Athlete Marcia Malsar carrying the torch during the opening ceremonies of the 2016 Paralympics.

Falling over in public is embarrassing. Doing so on camera for an international audience could make you want to crawl into a hole and never climb out. But when Brazilian athlete and torchbearer Marcia Malsar overbalanced the heavy torch, dropped it, and fell over, she got back up to thunderous applause and teary eyes all over social media.

In 1984, track and field athlete Marcia Malsar earned three medals, including a gold medal, contributing to Brazil’s first-ever Paralympic delegation to bring home the gold: her medals alone were more than Brazil had ever earned prior to the 1984 Games. She medaled in every event she competed in as a runner in 1984, demonstrating remarkable athletic versatility: not only did she succeed across distances by medaling in the 60m dash, the 200m sprint, and the 1000m cross-country run, she also competed in two different field events, the club throw and javelin. Malsar returned for two subsequent Games as well, earning silver in the 100m in Seoul 1988 and racing the 100m again in Barcelona 1992 before retiring from international Paralympic competition.

Instead of being remembered for her athletic achievements, which have been brief if not glossed-over entirely in media coverage, all focus has been on how she ate shit in public. Her reaction to the incident has been minimized in English-language media, if reported at all. Malsar is not a person with feelings or history in these stories, but a symbol, patronizingly stripped of her humanity for the consumption of a nondisabled audience.

Malsar isn’t the first Brazilian torchbearer to fall during Rio 2016: former swimmer and coach João Reinaldo Costa Lima Neto tripped in a pothole as he carried the Olympic torch. A television reporter named Henrique Arcoverde likewise took a spill. Folks often stepped in to help, as when this woman dropped the torch, but when the torch was run through the city of Joinville, its carrier fell over and found himself accosted by an onlooker with a fire extinguisher!

In all of these cases, media coverage identified these incidents as embarrassing, with the occasional snide implication that humans’ imperfect balance when carrying heavy things was somehow evidence of what a mess Brazil’s Olympic organization was. Unlike those tripping torchbearers, who became the butt of jokes, when Marcia Malsar fell, getting up somehow represented a triumph of the human spirit.

Far from pushing back or contradicting this faux-inspirational narrative, the official social media for the Paralympics has leaned right in. “What defines us is how well we rise after falling,” the official @Paralympics account tweeted out, including a three second clip of Malsar entitled “Never give up!” and calling it a “magical moment” on their Facebook page.

Later on, they doubled down on the inspiration porn, posting a picture of disabled Brazilian children strapped to walking adults using a harness similar to an Upsee, and calling it “Undoubtedly one of the most inspirational moments” from the opening ceremony. After years of criticism surrounding Paralympic rhetoric from academics, activists, and even athletes, official Paralympic media seems to ignore those concerns in order to pander a nondisabled audience hungry to interpret any and everything in the Paralympics as uniquely brave and meaningful simply because disabled people are involved.

Disabled kids, inspiring people to…idk, something

Whenever “inspiration” is brought up around disabled people, I always ask: what is it inspiring you to do? Inspiration is, when properly used, an impetus to action. Because someone did x, you decided to do y. Perhaps you could be inspired to a feeling, but when disabled people are involved, that feeling is rarely flattering on further interrogation: flavored by pity, it too often represents an inability to empathize and identify with disabled people, to realize that our interior lives and experiences are not so different from their own.

This is not to say that disabled people can never be inspiring without the saccharine condescension; there are legitimate contexts, fraught though it may be when the concept is so often misused. When I was a brand-new wheelchair user, just a couple weeks in, I caught glimpses of London 2012 on TV as I awkwardly learned to navigate sloped sidewalks and push and twist myself to get through heavy doors. Watching Paralympic swimming brought me back to my middle school backstroke days, so shortly after the Paralympics ended, I decided to up for a Master’s Swim group. I started racing a month later, basing my racing start on what I had seen Paralympians do. It turned into a love for athletics I never knew I had that has enriched and shaped my life for the past four years, turning an avowed bookworm and indoor kid into a competitive athlete. There is neither pity nor heroicism in that form of inspiration: by watching people like me, I was reminded that I could do the kinds of things that they do. So I did.

So when people say that they found Marcia Malsar inspirational, I have to wonder: what did it inspire them to do? What about the experience was so exceptional? Of course she got up after she fell—that’s what people do. It’s not brave, it’s perfectly ordinary. Real people don’t just lie there as millions watch on international television. Could you imagine yourself doing that in her situation? Really?

Of all the things that make Malsar special, all the accomplishments and history that brought her to that torch, the mundane human act of getting up after a spill is least among them. She deserves more than the objectification she’s received from international journalists and social media.

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