PARALYMPIC GAMES:STRENGTH IS all around you at the Paralympics. It's just not always strength as you know it. In fact, strength as you know it, or as you normally associate it with sport, feels absent a lot of the time here.
It’s what makes most of the events so spellbinding. When you see the men’s T38 runners collapse on the track like ninepins at the end of a 400m race that has shut their bodies down, you can see that every last piece of themselves has been left out there.
It’s quite alarming to watch, close up, what running flat out for a single lap of the track can do to some of these athletes’ bodies. And in pure, unemotive terms, there is a severe lack of strength on show there.
Mental strength, of course – more than most of us can get our heads around. But physical strength, no. Not as we’re used to seeing it in stadiums with 80,000 people present anyway.
For that reason, there isn’t a more counterintuitive sport at the Paralympics than powerlifting. With the absolute best will in the world, there are very few places or times outside here and now that you will ever look at someone sitting in a wheelchair and think: powerlifter.
Yet every day at the ExCel arena thousands pour in to watch it, the vast majority drawn by pure curiosity.
When they get here, they sit open-mouthed. They watch athletes who have had some or all of the lower half of their bodies give up on them fight with every fibre not to give up on the upper half.
Every bench press looks and sounds like an enormous heave of defiance against whatever it is that has caused their disability. For the normal two fingers, see two locked elbows.
Not every competitor comes out in a wheelchair but most of them do and those who don’t generally walk with a fairly pronounced limp. You haven’t had your head properly scrambled until you see a 10½-stone woman wheeled out on stage, helped out on to a bench, lie back and hoosh almost 24 stone of dead weight until her arms are straight.
You want strength as you know it? You can’t handle strength as you know it.
On Monday afternoon, a French powerlifter by the name of Souhad Ghazouani took the stage for the women’s 67kg competition.
She was pushed out by her coach, she hoisted herself up on to the bench as one of the gamesmakers took the chair away and stored it at the back of the stage.
Before she lay flat on her back, she grabbed her feet by the heels and threw them away from herself, like a child throwing a couple of rubber ducks out of the bath. Then the coach strapped her feet to the bench to hold them still.
Above her head was a Paralympic record weight of 146kg. If you’re looking for a handy guide to how heavy that is, take John Hayes and add about three stone. The way it works is that two assistants lift the bar off the rack and she reaches up to take it.
They remove their hands and she lowers it until it is parallel with her chest before lifting it until her elbows are locked. Ghazouani nailed it first time. Subsequent attempts at breaking her own world record of 147kg came to nothing but she still took gold by 7 kilos ahead of Yujiao Tan of China.
It was incredible. It was strength, brute strength, awesome strength.
Strength as you know it, yes. But in a form you never imagined was possible.
