“They Don’t Really Care about my Results, they Prefer Selling my Life Story.” Inspirational Paralympians and Sponsorship

Abstract

This article intends to analyze the links that Paralympic athletes and their staff members establish between the Paralympic athletes’ self-presentation as cyborgs or supercrips and their access to sponsors. Based on an interview survey of 15 Paralympic athletes and 42 members of their staffs, we will show that not all Paralympic athletes can be associated with inspirational cyborg or supercrip figures. Indeed, according to the Paralympic athletes and staff members interviewed, some discriminating criteria prevail for sponsors in their attribution of sponsorship contracts. Some Paralympic athletes report numerous situations in which they are perceived and presented in a miserabilist perspective of pity remote from any sponsorship perspective. We will then analyze the ableist dimension of the intelligibility frameworks through which Paralympic athletes claim to be recognized by sponsors. Finally, we will show how this type of recognizability continues to exclude and invisibilize Paralympic athletes who are the least inspiring for non-disabled people. Therefore, it appears that there are inequalities between Paralympic athletes in their access to sponsors according to the inspiration they arouse in non-disabled people.