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If Chicago wins the 2016 Olympic Summer Games, it could be a moving experience for thousands of disabled people around the world.
That’s because a majority of the seats in the planned Olympic venue at Washington Park may be converted into wheelchairs for the destitute and disabled, the Sun-Times reports.
Designers plan to make the 80,000 seat stadium collapsible so that it won’t take up as much space once the games – should Chicago land them – are finished. That means nearly 50,000 seats will go elsewhere. So they’re hatching a plan that would convert the remaining seats into permanent wheelchairs.
The idea belongs to Darren Brehm, a consultant for the Chicago 2016 bid team. Brehm has been wheelchair-bound ever since a 1990 car wreck left him paralyzed so he knows the value of this idea.
"It could change a lot of people's lives,'' said Brehm.
Olympic big wigs like it too.
"It addresses a social issue where we can make wheelchairs -- privately funded -- available to people around the world with disabilities,'' said Chicago 2016 bid CEO Patrick Ryan. "There are still people around the world who still have to drag themselves because they don't have wheelchairs."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From NBC Chicago:
