Multiple talk shows, all-day live matches on TV, and extensive coverage in the daily newspapers: the Olympics were hard to ignore this summer. The same cannot be said of the Paralympics, with live streams for the live matches, and a single daily 50-minute NPO report on TV, emphasising the key highlights. Aren't the Paralympic athletes being short-changed? “That is not how the media reason,” explains Hendriks Vettehen. “They are always asking themselves: how many people find this event relevant? Only 10% of Dutch people have a physical or mental disability. That is a relatively small group. In addition, the regular Olympics involve various sports, which many Dutch people are likely to have engaged in at some point. This intuitively makes them feel more connected to these sports: they can empathise with the athletes. That is not the case with wheelchair sports, for example, since many people have no personal experience with these sports.”
Losing interest
According to Hendriks Vettehen, the experienced distance and lack of familiarity with these sports is one of the main reasons why they attract less media attention. “Many Paralympic sports are relatively small, and people are not always familiar with the rules. The Paralympics also include various sports with all kinds of categories per disability. So you have to delve into it quite a bit to really understand what is going on. This in turn requires extra effort, which may cause people to lose interest more easily.”
Does the oft-cited reason that people don't like to watch athletes with a visible disability also play a role? Hendriks Vettehen: “As far as I know, that doesn't play a role. What we do know is that people are fascinated by anything exceptional. So a runner with, say, a lower leg prosthesis at the Olympics will attract attention. But if, at the Paralympics, all competitive runners run with one of those blades, it will be less striking. Our attention is drawn to contrast.”
More coverage than before
And yet, Hendriks Vettehen points to the fact that the media now devote more attention to the Paralympics than they did some 20 years ago. “The reason is that diversity in general has become more important in the public domain. I can imagine that the national broadcasters now see it as their duty to cover the Paralympics. Another factor that may play a role is the fact that Dutch Paralympic athletes won many medals in the last editions. This may have helped attract more media attention.”
Hendriks Vettehen also refers to a report by the Mulier Institute, a sports knowledge centre. The report reveals that in the previous two editions, in 2016 and 2021, approximately half the Dutch population devoted attention to the Paralympics at least once a week. One in five Dutch people even followed the event once a day. “That shows that there is a group that is interested in it.”
Yet Hendriks Vettehen doubts that media coverage of the Paralympics will grow any further. “You can of course keep calling attention to it, but I don't believe this will have any effect. You see, media attention always revolves around the issue of relevance. In addition to the observation that the Paralympics are only relevant to a relatively limited audience, we also live in an attention economy where all kinds of news and events are constantly competing for our attention. While there can certainly be room for niche events, media and public attention does generally tend to focus for a while on a single traditionally big event, in this case the Olympics. A lot of public attention for an event leads the media to report on it even more, which in turn generates more public attention; this goes on until a kind of saturation point is reached, and a new event comes along that attracts a lot of attention.”
Musing out loud, Hendriks Vettehen can only think of one change that could potentially lead to more media attention for the Paralympics. “It might be an idea to move the Paralympics to the odd-numbered years, which are the years in which there is no competition for attention from the Olympics or major football tournaments. That might slightly increase media interest, but within the current format, attention has reached its peak.”