When men inspire words, and words inspire men

10/09/2012
Time to read: 1 minute

Sam Howard pays homage to the Olympians and the Wordsmiths.

When men inspire words, and words inspire men blog
Thanks for the warm up. Now meet the Superhumans.
If writing strap lines was an Olympic sport,
that’s your gold medal winner right there

So clearly, clearly it’s not ‘disabled’ it’s ‘differently-abled’. A term that’s been around for years, but now looks set to be embraced wholesale after the last two awe-filled, outrageously beautiful, amazingly uplifting weeks, which have left us feeling spiritually renewed and oh so proud.

So what to do now with the defunct phrase ‘disabled’? It works ok if you throw ‘temporarily’ in front of it. Like, you fall off your skis and break a load of bones – you are temporarily disabled. Cos you’re probably just going to sit it out and sulk about a bit while you can’t do anything, until such time as you can.

Another way it could be applied is to those of us that are just useless at sport. At 6ft I”,  all shoulders, arms legs and feet – you’d think I’d be good at something, anything. But as my sporty father could testify, from the earliest age I’ve been quite rubbish at everything. Whip smart in my classes I’d get my comeuppance in PE,  three times weekly. Instead of letting my sporty dad coach/cajole me into doing anything involving developing physical skills, I preferred to stay indoors writing angsty poems and drawing very thin, dead-looking people. I have remained steadfastly crap at sports, as now my sporty son can testify.

I take some comfort in the belief that I’m not the only one, and I’d very much like to think that maybe it was a sportily-challenged person like myself, sitting in Channel 4’s superb in-house agency 4Creative, that came up with the concept and the words, Thanks for the warm up. Now meet the Superhumans. For those are mighty fine words, that provided the spark that lit the touch paper for the Paralympic flame to burn so very brightly.

A Paralympian, a differently-abled person, a Games Maker, a sports-incompetent, a creative – there’s room enough for all of us to contribute, to make a difference and to make it better.

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