Opinion: It's time for a merger
The idea may seem strange, perhaps even absurd at first: Why not have disabled and able-bodied athletes compete the same set of Games? For many years, top sporting executives have dismissed the idea out of hand, arguing that to do so would not do justice to either set of athletes. But is this still the case?
To answer this question, one has to be clear about what inclusion actually means. The goal of getting athletes with and without disabilities competing together has been pursued for many years - all over the world. However, this has mainly been at the level of recreational and school sports, while high-performance sports have continued to separate the two - first the Olympic Games, then, a good fortnight later, the Paralympics. This arrangement is not a good idea - despite the fact that the Paralympics benefit from the infrastructure of the Olympics. There is less attention paid to the achievements of the Paralympians because by the time the Paralympic Games start, people have moved on to other things, such as the Bundesliga, the Champions League, the US Open, etc. It also feeds the sense that disabled athletes are anything but what they really are: simply athletes.
Parallel events instead of an annoying add-on
Everybody knows that most disabled athletes can't really compete with their able-bodied counterparts. Therefore, inclusion is not about making disabled athletes compete against able-bodied athletes. This would not be in keeping with the idea of creating a level playing field. Incidentally, this is also the case when disabled athletes have the advantage of biomechanically optimized high-tech prostheses, which allow them to run or jump faster than any able-bodied athletes relying only on their own flesh and blood could ever hope to.
True Olympic inclusion would mean holding parallel events involving able-bodied athletes and disabled athletes in the same venue and in front of the same spectators. This would do more than just raise the profile of disabled sports. It would prevent a reoccurrence of what happened in Rio. Shortly before the 2016 Paralympics began, they were in danger of being called off because the Olympics had already used up all the funds. Only when federal and municipal governments stepped in and injected 70 million euros ($79 million) was the "worst situation in the history of the Paralympic history" - as International Paralympic Committee (IPC) president Sir Philip Craven described it - rectified.
It is time to stop the Paralympics from being seen as an "annoying duty" to be fulfilled after the "real Games" have wrapped up. This is the impression that International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach created by failing to attend the opening ceremony for the Paralympics.
The fact that more than 1.5 million tickets have been sold for the Paralympics shows that events involving disabled athletes have a lot of potential. Billions of television viewers show that there is interest among the masses. If you were to remove the stigma of being something different and somehow weaker in terms of sporting achievements, it would take high-performance sports as a whole - to a whole new level. Before you could do that though, a few steps would be required. First, you would need to simplify the Paralympics' confusing impairment-classification system, and second, you would have to reduce the general scope of the Games.
Few sports federations take inclusion seriously
The IPC had hoped that by the Rio Games it would have been able to discontinue its work as the governing body for disabled sports - and hand those duties over to the federations that run the individual sports. A few individual federations like those for triathlon and canoeing have gone along with this idea, organizing competitions for both able-bodied and disabled athletes. However, many others, such as the swimming and athletics federations, have shown little interest in the idea. When it comes to the goal of inclusion at the highest levels of sports, nothing will really change without a clear signal from the International Olympic Committee.