Introduction by Croakey: As the Paralympic Games begin in Paris this week, Marayke Jonkers, a retired paratriathlete and Paralympic swimmer, provides some timely suggestions for mitigating COVID-19 risk, as well as other infectious diseases.
Jonkers, who is also the President of People with Disability Australia, says that the Paralympics are a prime opportunity for a public health awareness campaign on the COVID-19 measures to protect people’s health, particularly those who are most at risk from severe illness.
This is the third article in a Croakey series: also see earlier articles here and here.
Marayke Jonkers writes:
I’m going to start with something that’s not actually directly COVID-related. A lot of people who aren’t athletes, or who’ve never lived in an Olympic or a Paralympic village, may not realise that a huge volume of athletes are actually competing sick — and this is before we had COVID.
When you bring a large number of people from all over the world together, living on top of each other, illnesses spread.
I was stunned at my first Games as a teenager in Sydney 2000. I had trained so hard, only to end up with some kind of cold or flu bug that made me feel really sick and weak. It came back three times during the 10-day Games because it was circulating.
Athletes, who are at their absolute physical peak, may seem strong and healthy, but the minute you stop that intense training and do what’s called a taper — which is resting before your race — you become highly susceptible to illness.
Your body thinks, “things are good, I can take a break and get sick now,” much like how people seem to get sick whenever they take a holiday.
So, this is a reality we’ve known about even before COVID.
Risk mitigation
What surprises and astounds me is that we’ve gone through an entire global education campaign about how to prevent the spread of illness — hand washing, mask-wearing, social distancing — and then it’s like we’ve wiped that from our collective memory and gone back to not doing those things to protect one another.
I know even going back as early as 2004, we were wearing masks on planes to avoid getting sick from the airplane.
Athletes from different countries are figuring out what level of precautions to take against all illnesses, not just COVID, because there’s COVID, and then there’s every other kind of illness you can catch from one another. If you catch multiple illnesses on top of each other, heaven help people.
But already, people are deciding how much risk mitigation they want to do.
One thing that is very difficult is, once you are all confined in that space, figuring out what to do with someone who becomes sick.
It’s already common practice in these big teams to have extra hotel rooms booked, and extra rooms in the village that act as quarantine rooms – this was happening even before COVID. Going back to the 1990s, there were already rooms booked. If someone got sick, they would go into these rooms where food and care were provided, but they weren’t around the rest of the team because that’s the best thing for the team. They all know, understand, and cooperate with that.
An individual athlete might decide to be socially responsible and say, “I don’t feel well, I’m going to stay home,” but they’re probably already in one of those isolation rooms I mentioned. I’m talking about the Australian team — I can’t speak for what every other team does, but this is what our team has always done. So, our team will be doing this again.
We already have isolation rooms and procedures in place to get medical care to people.
It wasn’t as strict as the lockdown in Tokyo, but people are aware of wearing masks in crowded places and within the team.
Whether athletes compete or not is a decision for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC).
The word Paralympics means “parallel,” and these events run side by side. It has nothing to do with “paralysed” or “paraplegic,” as some might think. They have equal status and take place in the same venue with the same status. Simply put, one follows the other since 1960 in Rome, with the first edition of the Paralympics.
The rules that are going to be set will be different for the Paralympic Committee and the Olympic Committee, and each team is going to set its own rules. Stopping athletes from competing while sick would come down to a decision by the IOC and the national teams themselves.
Public health awareness
Not everyone with a disability is as high-risk or as vulnerable as others because, in the Paralympics, not every disability is higher risk than the general population, but some are. So, it’s about how to protect that.
The World Championships, which was held as a qualifying event, had no spectators, whereas the non-disabled World Championships did. This was an attempt to give the athletes the safest possible competition environment.
Now, we are hearing from the World Health Organization that COVID is something we need to learn to live with as a community, just like cold and flu viruses and any other illness that does the rounds.
That is, in fact, what we grapple with at a Games like this.
It’s just as likely to be spreading through the spectators, which concerns me because there are a lot of disabled spectators who might also be high-risk and don’t have access to the protections and medical care available in the village.
This type of international event crowds a lot of people together into small buses. The athletes’ village is small, with small accommodations, shared bedrooms, and shared apartments. It’s not a luxury hotel — it’s two or four people per room in bunk-bed-style living. This is the prime environment to spread something, but so are the grandstands and the public transport for the spectators.
I think this is one of those times when a public health awareness campaign is needed. In terms of awareness, this is actually probably the most COVID-prone Games, although we might think of Tokyo that way.
There might have been fewer cases because of the massive protocols in place. Medals weren’t even put around athletes’ necks — they started the tradition of presenting each other with medals off a tray in front of them, to avoid contact and protect athletes from getting sick.
Paris is our first Games since the Tokyo Games, and we’ve already seen the Olympics become the “COVID Games.” There have been athletes competing with COVID, and lots of social media posts and media stories about spectators catching COVID and being surprised, then realising, “Of course, we were in a large crowd.”
So, this is a prime example and reminder to all of us that COVID is not over, and that some people are much more vulnerable and perhaps might not even be leaving their houses.
If we can continue to do what we learned — all of the safety measures — it’s the best chance we have of athletes competing without getting sick or potentially dying.
There is an ethical debate that seems obvious to the rest of the community but not to the athlete world: “Why would you compete when you’re sick?”
But to an athlete — whether Olympic, Paralympic, or otherwise — if you’ve been training for decades and decades for one race and you think you can pull it off, dragging yourself out of bed with the flu has been seen as a badge of honour. People are doing it.
So, if this is something we, as a community, want to condemn, then maybe we want to start a discussion about glorifying continuing to work when we’re sick, rather than taking time off. It’s the same, but worse for the athlete, because their job isn’t coming back for another four years, and they might not qualify again.
So, it’s a very hard thing to have a direct answer on: yes or no, should athletes be competing with COVID?
Valuing equity
Equity means everybody doesn’t just get treated the same; they get what they need.
So, equal might be that everybody got a seat, but equitable might mean the people in wheelchairs didn’t have to sit where the bench was too tall for them to see the event they were watching, while those standing up had a perfect view the whole time. You could all stand and watch the event, but it’s not equity if the person in a wheelchair can only hear and not see.
We’re talking about equity, which is a key value of the Paralympics, referenced in terms of both equality and equity.
This means it is imperative that every single athlete from every country has access to the antiviral treatment that science provides, helping speed up recovery and prevent conditions from worsening.
One of the beautiful things about the Olympic and Paralympic Games is that once every four years, we hold a mirror up to ourselves and see the world as we hope it could be, rather than as it is in reality. We see every country, every ability, and every type of story competing, inspiring, pushing their limits, and bringing beautiful human stories home.
However, the reality is that not everybody has equal and equitable funding just to get there — in terms of uniforms, travel, and equipment. So, not every national Paralympic Committee will have the funding to bring that medical treatment. This would need to come through the medical committee, committing to provide for all athletes if they wish to receive it.
Of course, there’s always the element of choice if someone doesn’t want to receive treatment, but the issue of fairness remains.
What I’ve always seen at the Paralympics, which breaks my heart, is that some athletes are there with clunky hospital wheelchairs, not the high-quality equipment we take for granted in the Western world, which they have to compete with.
Those teams probably won’t have a fully equipped medical team, let alone the necessary antiviral treatments. This extends to team staff and anyone in contact with athletes. If a support worker or coach gets extremely sick, the whole team won’t function well together anymore. So, those protection protocols extend there as well.
It’s a dynamic you might not think about in the Olympics but is essential in the Paralympics.
Some athletes need assistance with daily living activities from a support worker, who may not even be a designated support worker because there’s only a certain number of accreditation passes per country.
Some countries have to double up a coach or team manager to provide that personal support. Whoever that person is, the best protection for all the athletes is to ensure they also have access to whatever is necessary.
• Marayke Jonkers is a retired paratriathlete and Paralympic swimmer, and is also the President of People with Disability Australia.
Previously at Croakey
See Croakey’s archive of articles on COVID-19
