U.S. Paralympians hoping for equal treatment

The intro to a good in-depth story about the Paralympics in the NY Times Sept. 5:

AURORA, Ill. — When he rolls to the starting line for the 1,500-meter wheelchair race at the Paralympics, the Olympics for disabled athletes that begin Saturday in Beijing, Tony Iniguez (pictured left) will wear his Team USA uniform with pride. He will compete for the United States’s Olympic program. He is also suing it for discrimination.

Iniguez is one of many Paralympians who criticize the United States Olympic Committee for providing less direct financial assistance and other benefits at lower levels to Paralympic athletes than to Olympians in comparable sports. The committee awards smaller quarterly training stipends and medal bonuses to Paralympic athletes. Benefits like free health insurance, which help athletes devote more hours to training, are available to a smaller percentage of Paralympians.

The United States is no stranger to disputes over discrimination against various groups and the provision of benefits for citizens, as the battle over universal health insurance indicates. But in this case the Paralympians are emphasizing their needs as athletes as much as their needs as citizens. They claim that races have been lost and medals squandered by their having to compete against athletes from nations like Canada and Britain that support their disabled athletes and Olympians virtually equally.

Iniguez, a 37-year-old high school art teacher here, says that because he has had to work full time to provide his family’s health insurance and has received almost no assistance from the U.S.O.C., he will race in Beijing relatively unprepared for the serious competition.

“I’m going to do my best over there, believe me — but I can’t help but wonder what I could do if I’d been able to fully train the last four years,” he said. Iniguez added that equal support to disabled athletes was as logical as the reforms that have opened equal sports opportunity to women: “Male and female, are you going to discriminate on the basis of sex? It’s unfathomable now. We don’t give different support to women.”

The sprinter Kortney Clemons, one of many injured Iraq war veterans who have become elite disabled athletes, agreed with Iniguez’s frustration.

“I thought that when I was protecting this country, we had the best,” said Clemons, a former combat medic in Iraq who lost his right leg in an explosion. “We do things right, we do things the best way. And just to know that other countries can man up and support their Paralympic athletes, and we’re not, it’s disappointing.”

Other disabled athletes said they viewed the situation differently. Marlon Shirley, a champion amputee sprinter, said that benefits for Paralympic athletes had improved but could not reach Olympic equality.

“On paper, it looks absolutely atrocious — I’m aware of that — but the Olympics is big business,” Shirley said. He added that when an American sprinter wins a gold medal at the Olympics, “compared to when Marlon Shirley wins the gold medal in the Paralympics, commercially, it’s a hell of a lot greater.”

In hearing the lawsuit brought by Iniguez and two retired wheelchair racers, the United States District Court and the United States Court of Appeals have ruled that the U.S.O.C. has the legal discretion to finance able-bodied and disabled athletes differently. (The case has been appealed to the Supreme Court.) But even the District Court judge who ruled against Iniguez in 2006 wrote: “Do I decry a culture that relegates Paralympians to second-class status in the quantity and quality of benefits and support they receive from the U.S.O.C.? Emphatically yes.”