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Today is the last day of the Paralympics in London. They come and go so quietly compared to the big summer games. If you live in the UK, you had a chance to watch over 400 hours of Paralympics broadcasts on Channel 4. In contrast, in the United States NBC had four nights of an hour long highlight show to cover the 11 days of ceremony and games. In Mongolia we got a good 4-6 hours of daily coverage, even after all of the Mongolian athletes came back home without medals. It’s reported that 11 million people tuned in to the opening ceremonies, nearly three times the number of viewers of the 2008 games in Beijing. China can console itself through a massive stack of medals its athletes will be taking home this summer. They are up to 95 gold medals so far, kept company by 71 silvers, and 65 bronze. Not too shabby. Pictured here are the “Sook Sisters” (they all have “sook” in their name and aren’t actually related), Korea’s archery heroes who came away with one gold medal a piece, and an extra silver for Hwa Sook. South Korea had a lot invested in its athletes this year. Most of its athletes trained and lived at the newly built Korean Sports Training Center d’ground, a beautiful facility South East of Seoul designed just for Paralympians . Leading up to the games, Korean TV broadcast touching documentaries about the lives of some the athletes, and the coaches and family members who support them in their training. Back in June, GR blogged about Maya Nakanishi who was getting some flack for fund raising with a self-published calendar featuring some sexy shots with just her prosthetic. She did end up making it London this year, and she competed in three Athletic games, but didn’t get any medals. I hope she can make it again in 2016. (Calendars as Christmas gifts are a big seller, Maya…) Fundraising is just one of the challenges facing paralympic athletes. There was a record breaking number of participating athletes this year, 4,200 from 164 countries. In contrast, more than 10,000 from 204 countries competed in the Olympic games. Even if a paralympic athlete can overcome cultural stigma in their country, their personal physical challenges, and train hard enough to dominate in their categorized sport, they still have to find a way to pay for it all and make it to the games. It’s depressing to think of all the individuals who are held back by financial resources when they’ve been able to take on everything else. There’s a dark side to the Paralympics, just like there is for the Olympic games. Much has been written about the “supercrip” archetype that surfaces with the Paralympic games. It’s fascinating, provocative, and a conversation that should be continued to better understand the challenges faced by the differently-abled. North Korea can enter into the supercrip conversation now. They debuted their first ever Paralympic athlete in London. At the very...
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Maya Nakanishi was a 21-year-old dreaming of a tennis career when a five-ton steel girder fell on her at work severing her right leg below the knee. After six months of hospitalization, a resolute Nakanishi began training with a prosthetic limb and showed remarkable progress right away, qualifying for a berth on the Japanese team at the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games. Although she barely missed medalling at the ’08 Paralympics, Nakanishi vowed to transform herself into one of the best prosthetic-wearing sprinters in the world, and a year later was accepted into a program that enabled her to train under gold medal triple jumper Al Joyner at a U.S. Olympic Training Center in California. Nakanishi is currently training in preparation for the 2012 London Paralympic Games to be held August 29 till Sept. 9, the biggest paralympic event ever with 4200 athletes from 160 countries competing in 20 events. But world-class “amateur athletics” is a misnomer, and para-athletes often pay their own expenses to compete unlike they able-bodied counterparts. Nakanishi, now 26, found herself scrimping to make her athletic dreams come true. Aside from everyday living expenses, Maya had to pay to use training facilities and for her trainer.  Paralympic regulations required that she have at least two prosthetic limbs for the competition. And at about 1.2 million yen ($14,500) a piece, they cost a pretty penny. During the worst times, Nakanishi found herself living in her car. But Maya lost a limb not her resolve. Earlier this year, she decided to publish a calendar featuring photographs of her posing semi-nude wearing nothing but her rose-pink prosthesis, raising quite a few eyebrows across prudish Japan. Some people went as far to criticize Maya for “humiliating disabled people” by baring her disability. “A prosthetic limb is something beautiful, not something you should be embarrassed at being seen with,” said Nakanishi, whose prosthetic legs are made of red fabric and fabric with a rose print. She also said that publishing a semi-nude calendar is also meant to bring more attention to the financial adversity fellow Paralympic athletes are facing. “No matter how much disdain and bashing I will receive for the calendar, I want to pave the way for younger athletes to shine,” she said. A limited 2,000 copies at 1200 yen (US$15) apiece are available. Visit Nakanishi’s website at ameblo.jp/n-maya/ for details. [Yahoo! Sports ~ Maya Nakanishi] [Spiegel Online ~ Maya Nakanishi: Ein Kalender als Paralympics-Ticket] [The Asahi Shimbun ~ Athlete poses seminude to fund Paralympic dream]  
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