Perhaps my favourite and oft-repeated story of the Paralympics is of the flight back from Sydney to Johannesburg on an SAA flight in 2000. I was seated next to Leon Fleiser, then a wheelchair basketball player and now the chef de mission. ‘Check my leg room,” were his first words to me. The team had been given a few days of holiday in Sydney as a thank you from the sponsors for a job well done.
They had stayed at the Menzies Hotel, where a piano player called Kylie would entertain patrons in the well-named Piano Bar. ‘What’s the best thing about having a wheelchair?” Leon asked me. I shrugged. ‘You always have somewhere to sit down in a bar.”
We talked and we drank for the entire flight. There was the story about an amputee athlete who had swapped some of his South African kit for that of a Canadian. A NSW police officer told him he liked the Canadian kit, so the athlete bargained with him and got the cop’s leather jacket in return.
The athlete wore the leather jacket on a night out in Sydney, but when he stepped outside of the bar, police approached him and asked him where he had got it. He was bundled into a car and taken to the police station where he explained what had happened. The cops saw the funny side of it and asked him to remove the police insignia from the jacket. When he got back to the bar, his mates didn’t stop laughing. ‘When we were in the athletes’ village we were the Village People. Now we are Arrested Development.”
When is dark humour not dark? When a Paralympian tells you a disabled joke.
I left Sydney, the first of the four Paralympic Games I have attended, having heard more jokes about the blind, amputees, paralysed and the cerebral palsied. The CP athletes did not let up. Malcolm Pringle, the 400m and 800m runner, has a tongue that refuses to obey his brain and his words come out slurred and wet.
He and the late Gert van der Merwe, the two-time shotput gold medallist, made an unholy pair. Pringle saw a picture of Van Der Merwe on the team’s website, his wrist in that Shane Warne leg-spin cramp. ‘You look lank spastic in that picture,” said Pringle. ‘F**k you, I’m handicapped, not spastic,” replied Van der Merwe. ‘What’s your handicap?” laughed Pringle. ‘About 24, but I don’t play golf that much.” Badaboom.
In Sydney, the night after the opening ceremony, someone had moved the tables to different settings. No-one told the visually impaired athletes. Cue madness as they some crashed into tables and knocked over plates. Also in Sydney, a journalist asked an Australian wheelchair basketball player: ‘Have you always wanted to be a Paralympian?” He looked at her and smiled: ‘Not when I could f**king walk, I didn’t.”
I am sad I won’t be in Rio for these Games, but I will be watching as much as I can on the telly and writing about it for Independent News. There will be medals, there will be joy. There are stories that need to be told, athletes who need to be lauded and jokes that need to be repeated. Like the end to my trip with Leon in 2000.
As we were about to land in Joburg, Leon and I decided it would be best to freshen up. He pulled his toothbrush and paste out of his bag and called the stewardess, the same one who had been serving us with whisky, albeit more and more reluctantly as the flight wore on. He asked her for a glass of water so he could brush his teeth.
‘Sir, the toilets are just over there,” she huffed. ‘I know. But I can’t walk. I’m disabled,” he said.
She looked down at his legs in horror. Then scuttled off and was back in a flash with the water. I wasn’t letting this chance go. I was wearing a Team SA shirt. ‘Hi. I also can’t walk. Could you?” And she was gone and back again in seconds. ‘This is fun,” I said to Leon. ‘No, it’s not fun yet. Wait until she sees you walk past her out of the plane.”
It's true. Disables athletes like to tell disabled jokes
The Star