Paralympics: Britain is Winning So Why Aren't We Watching?

Wherever there are medals to be won in sport, there is controversy. The Paralympics are not immune. Uproar in Athens last week centred on the complete absence of American television networks at the current games.

Whereas NBC, the US television rights holder, had an army of representatives there for the Olympics, not one has stayed on for this subsequent event. A programme of highlights will eventually be shown to American viewers - six weeks after the closing ceremony.

In contrast, the BBC has doubled its coverage since Sydney and is broadcasting live from the Paralympics for the first time. Whereas the corporation once limited its output to a single review of the games (shown sometime in December), it now dedicates considerable airtime to it. Radio Five Live has regular updates and live commentary, as does the World Service, while there is online coverage and video/audio reports on the Paralympic broadband service.

But, and here's the crunch, who is actually tuning in? While my aim was to follow the games with Olympic enthusiasm, I confess I have yet to park myself on the sofa for the duration of any of Clare Balding's evening presentations. Despite vowing I would get round to it, catching snippets of action is the most I have managed. Not, it seems, that I am alone.

While the BBC proudly announced that audiences reached a peak of 2.2m during the Paralympics opening ceremony, it has not afforded quite so much publicity to the subsequent figures, which hover close to one million. Pretty good, you might think, but not in comparison with other major sporting events including the Olympics which, at best, had 12.8m of us glued to our sets and regularly drew half that amount on days of considerably lesser action.

So, if we aren't watching these Paralympics in the anticipated droves, why not? Are we simply suffering post-Olympic fatigue, our attention spans having already peaked and slumped? Maybe. But my guess is there are other reasons at play.

Preconceptions of the Paralympics somehow promise they will be a display of human endeavour without politics and, frankly, without cheating. We expect human competition in its purest, most uplifting form. Well, that naive optimism was crushed even before the games began.

Phil Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), unveiled a darker side to disability sport when he revealed that the Canadian wheelchair athlete Earle Connor, a silver medalist in Sydney and one of the world's leading sprinters, had tested positive for trace amounts of testosterone in an out-of-competition test last month.

Two powerlifters from Azerbaijan have have since failed drugs tests for the second time and have been banned for life from the Paralympics, and the judo champion Sergio Perez was stripped of his medal on Friday after also failing a test.

If cynicism is turning off the viewing public then so too, one suspects, is confusion. Following Paralympic competition is not easy: there is not, for example, one 400m wheelchair track champion but several, and there are eight categories for the wheelchair field events. Getting your head around the disability classes for most of the 19 Paralympic sports requires an effort of concentration that can detract somewhat from the enjoyment of watching.

Not that this is helped by the International Paralympic Committee's decision to reclassify some athletes on a whim, often resulting in appeals being made to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Such was the case of Jenny Ridley, one of Britain's best hopes for gold, whose medal chances were all but destroyed when she was switched at the last minute from the T52 class of wheelchair track races to T53 for less disabled athletes. Ridley withdrew from competing at the weekend.

Beyond the wranglings, however, the Paralympics are still worth a look. Britain's record at these games is supreme; the team returned from Sydney with 41 gold medals. If British success and hearing the national anthem lights your fire, then at the very least you might set the video for 6pm tonight.