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Making Disabled Sport Even More Exciting Than Abled |
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Score
87%
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226 votes,
Feasibility
88%
Originality
89%
Humour
21% |
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After the Manchester Commonwealth Games admirable 'first' of including disabled events in the main athletics programme I suggest a technical and 'atmospheric' improvement.
With over twelve official classes of disability and no heats in their events, the selection of the best in each class is done prior to the games. This means that in the pool and track events the athletes - almost all of different classes - compete not against each other but against the world record for their class. Whoever comes closest to breaking this record is awarded the Gold Medal, and so on.
Yet whilst this is an excellent way of ensuring the athletes have the physical presence of others to spur them on, it also means a hiatus at the end of the race whilst the computer determines the medals. This means a significant dip in the energy of the crowd and an unpleasant wait for the competitors.
I suggest placing a digital clock at both ends of each lane, split into three horizontal displays. The top display would show the record being aimed at in that lane, the middle display the elapsed time of the athlete's progress during the race and the bottom display the mean difference - plus or minus - between the two times at the finish. Not only would this allow the athletes to measure their progress and add an extra element of excitement for the crowd, but also ensure that the seemingly slowest would be cheered in by true encouragement - rather than the traditional empathy afforded the last to finish - as the crowd watched their clock and urged them on against it, especially if they could calculate that a medal was still up for grabs.
This would be refined still further if the clocks were keyed into the main scoreboard so that the moment a given athlete finished, the computer displayed their present medal ranking. As the board gradually filled with names the rankings would change several times and the visual spectacle afforded by this ongoing shuffle of the medal placings would add a measure of tension for both crowd and competitors that able-bodied events could only look upon with envy.
And most importantly, the moment the race finished, the crowd's cheers of support would swell, without pause, into those of celebration and praise as they do in all other events.
Richard Sinnott
[Richard Sinnott has another idea on the Global Ideas Bank; see Teach sign language in all the world's schools]
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Richard Sinnott is a professional actor based in Manchester, UK.
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