Some More Competitors: Following the handing out of the Whang Youn Dai award five more competitors were invited on stage.
In the Olympics these would be the competitors who'd been elected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). However the IPC doesn't do this. I certainly don't remember such a sequence taking place at the 2014 Sochi. Therefore I have no idea what this sequence was about.
However what I suspect happened is that the IPC handed the Whang Youn Dai award to Tatyana McFadden and Ibrahim Al Hussein simply to make a political point about the effect the US' behaviour towards Russia is having on the people of Syria.
For example in 2014 the male award went to Toby Kane for his role in holding the Australian team together following the death of teammate Matthew Robinson in a competition just weeks before the games. Neither McFadden nor Al Hussein had shown that sort of leadership or altruistic behaviour. McFadden in particular is very keen on the type of self-promotion which the Whang Youn Dai award is supposed to frown upon.
Therefore I think these five competitors were being recognised as the people - politics aside - who should have won the Whang Youn Dai award. There were;
- Monica Bascio - A cyclist from the US,
- Kurt Fearnley - An athlete from Australia,
- Chelsea Gotel - A swimmer from Canada,
- Eliva Stinissen - A sitting volleyball player from the Netherlands,
- Sarah Storey - A cyclist from UK.
They were then joined on stage by Brazilian singer Saulo. He actually went on to do a full set later on so I'll discuss him in more detail then. Saulo was dressed in a t-shirt with an anatomically correct human heart on it. He sang a version of Bob Marley's "One Love" while the competitors and athletes danced with him.
This was intended as a reference to the end of the Parade of Nations in the Opening Ceremony when an image of a human heart was overlayed over pictures of all the competitors. It referenced all the connotations of that sequence.
Highlights Montage: We were then shown a video montage of the highlights of the games just gone. Here several things did stand out to me.
The first of these is that it did seem to feature a disproportionally high number of female competitors wearing the Hijab. In fact I think every competitor who wore the Hijab was featured in the montage. Looking back over the games the Hijab or more specifically the Burkini was one of the big talking points of the games. This was particularly true in the swimming events.
For example there was that Dutch swimmer whose name I deliberately ignored who wore the Keffiyeh scarf as she made her way to the pool. Then there was the British swimmers and their black coats. Worn to keep the competitors muscles warm as they wait to race on average sized swimmers these looked perfectly normal. However when they're worn by Dwarves like Ellie Simmonds - particularly with the hood up - they do start to closely resemble Niqabs or Burqas.
Another UK dwarf swimmer Ellie Robinson became a bit of a celebrity because of her coat. She walked out in this big coat with the hood up and then threw her arms out to the sides in a sort of Hip Hop power pose. In true Para-Olympic fashion apparently what actually happened is this shy 16 year old girl was simply trying to raise her hands above her head to return the applause of the crowd. Then her shoulders suddenly locked as sometimes happens to dwarves and she was forced to just try and style it out.
So rather than making a further point the Hijab was featured here as a way to look back at the games and go; "Do you remember when we talked about...?"
I also noticed that British Equestrian rider Sophie Christiansen featured quite heavily. In talking about the Opening Ceremony I said that Sophie Christiansen had chosen not to compete in Rio because she thought it was more important to concentrate on her career as a statistical analyst for Goldman Sachs. Clearly this was not true.
Back at the 2012 London games I did talk about Sophie Christiansen rather a lot. To the point I noticed that I was starting to embarrass her. This year I didn't want to make things worse by appearing to be her Internet stalker by constantly searching to see what she was up to. I did do a quick, cursory search of all the Equestrian competitors and not seeing her name on the list made the assumption that she wasn't competing.
I will admit that I didn't check too hard though because I think the way I phrased what I did write better helped to illustrate my point.
When it comes to public attitudes towards disability I think people with Cerebral Palsy get a particularly rough deal. If you see someone missing part or all of one of their legs it's quite easy for you to understand that they were either born without it or lost it at some point.
People with Cerebral Palsy suffer from tremors, spastic contractions and speech problems. Even if you do understand the condition it's much harder for you to process what's going on with the person. Particularly in their minds. Frankly it looks a bit weird and it tends to freak people out a bit.
This is extremely frustrating for people with Cerebral Palsy because the condition only affects the way the brain connects to the nervous system through the Cerebellum and the Brain Stem. The rest of the brain functions perfectly normally with all the usual thoughts, emotions and desires of a person without Cerebral Palsy.
Sophie Christiansen is a particularly extreme example of this because she has quite a high degree of facial paralysis which makes it difficult to talk. When she does speak she has to speak slowly and often her words are slurred. This can give the impression that she is stupid.
That is completely wrong because with a masters degree in mathematics Sophie Christiansen is actually extremely intelligent. Even if she could speak with the clarity of a classically trained actress you still probably couldn't understand half the things she says. They're just so intelligent and complicated.
I also noticed that the Dutch sitting volleyball team featured prominently in the highlights montage.
This was in reference to another one of the big political issues that dominated the games. The long awaited Dutch criminal investigation into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Shamali Province (nee: Ukraine) in July 2014.
From the start this investigation has been intended not as an attempt to bring justice to the victims but as a piece of propaganda to punish Russia for its longstanding opposition to terror groups such as ISIL and the Sultan Mehmed divisions. The parameters of the investigation are entirely wrong looking solely at the firing of the missile whilst ignoring how the aircraft came to be in the skies over a warzone.
Legally the problem with this is that even if the investigation can identify the specific individual who pressed the button to launch the missile prosecutors still need to demonstrate what is in any way illegal about using a weapon of war during a war. The best they can hope for is to demonstrate that the firing of the missile was negligent because no proper checks were made to establish that it was a military aircraft.
The law has to be applied equally. Therefore if you are going to look at negligence you have to look at the negligence of all parties including the air traffic controllers who gave permission for a civilian aircraft to be flown into a warzone. From the start the parameters of the Dutch investigation have been set specifically to prevent that from happening.
There was a very strong rumour that the Dutch had been planning to release the results of this investigation on August 26th (26/8/16) - five days after the end of the ISIL games. However that has clearly not happened. To borrow a volleyball term the Dutch appear to have spiked their report. At least until they can go back and do it properly.
My reading of the Dutch women's hockey team's shock defeat to the British team during the last days of the ISIL is that the Dutch have now completely disowned this MH17 report as a piece of pro-ISIL propaganda.
Shamali Province themselves had an extremely successful games. They ended up finishing third in the medal table with 117 medals including 41 Golds. They even beat the US team who only 115 medals including 40 Golds into fourth place.
With Russia being banned from these games Shamali Province obviously had a lot of help from the IPC who wanted to further show their support. However to be so successful Shamali Province also needed a lot of help from other nations. They seemed to keen to have Shamali Province winning so many events, appearing in so many medal ceremonies and appearing so high up the medal table to promote discussion about Shamali Province rather than to show their support.
As a result from about the third day of the games lots of whispered references to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music" started flying about. Particularly that one song; "(How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria." I though thought; "Sixteen Going On Seventeen" better encapsulated the IPC's relationship with the Nazis of Shamali Province's 1st Galician Division.
In a spectacular coincidence Charmian Carr who played the Liesl character who sung Sixteen Going on Seventeen in the famous 1965 movie died on Friday (16/9/16). This was announced by her family right at the start of the Closing Ceremony on Sunday (18/9/16).
Carr was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Wrongly confused with Dementia which is non-specific memory loss Alzheimer's is a disease of the brain which destroys Prions. These are proteins that make up braincells. How the disease progresses depends on what braincells are destroyed first. However it tends to start by affecting memory followed by cognitive and reasoning skills before moving on to destroy coordination and movement before finally resulting in death.
It is certainly possible that all these whispered references to the Sound of Music finally pushed Carr's diminished brain capacity over the edge causing her to die. However that's as opposed to her dying of the disease either this week or the next.
Fun With Flags: As with the Olympics it is a matter of IPC protocol that each Closing Ceremony features a performance of the Para-Olympic anthem and the lowering of the Para-Olympic flag. That flag is then ceremonially handed over to the next host - in this case Japan 2020 - before the next host's flag is raised and their anthem played.
In this flag ceremony the IPC allowed its anthem to be interpreted by a group of Brazilian musicians. This featured an accordion player, an acoustic guitar player and what seemed to me to be a Boha guitar. This was obviously a little nod to the earlier Guitar Heroes sequence.
During this sequence the giant TV screen was playing a video sequence focused on the sense of touch. This looked as though objects were being pushed up against flesh toned latex. There was some Braille writing, what appeared to be a human ear and the Para-Olympic Agitos logo.
This obviously referenced the Synesthesia theme. The latex skin also seemed to be a reference to Rossum's Universal Robots as it relates to the language barrier theme.
At around 17:10 on 21/9/16 (UK date) I'll probably pick this up tomorrow now.
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