Paralympics celebrate disability, but in Paris, access has been hit-or-miss

Landre, 25, an American living in London, is one of thousands of disabled people who are in Paris for the Paralympics, and have experienced the mixed emotions of celebrating disabled athletes in a somewhat inaccessible city.

“Over the last week I’ve been here, I’ve gone through stages: At first I was like, this is excellent given the constraints of the city of Paris. Then I started having issues,” Landre said.

In preparation for the Paralympics, which end Sunday, France spent about 1.5 billion euros ($1.66 billion) to make public spaces more accessible; all of its bus and tram lines and stations are now wheelchair accessible. However, out of the more than 300 Métro stations in Paris, only 29 are wheelchair accessible.

Still, the International Paralympic Committee pointed to this year’s Games as an example to be followed. In his Opening Ceremonies speech, IPC President Andrew Parsons said, “I hope Paris 2024 starts a Paralympic revolution, the inclusion revolution.”

To learn what it was like to navigate Paris with a disability during the Games, The Washington Post spent an afternoon with Landre, who had traveled to the city for a week to cheer on the athletes in various events. The Post also interviewed athletes and other fans about accessibility at the Games.

Improving accessibility

Landre’s accessibility issues at the Paralympics began at the Aug. 28 Opening Ceremonies. At a community viewing area in the northeast part of the city, she found the wheelchair viewing platform blocked by non-disabled spectators.

“Creating access is messy,” she said. “I’m so thrilled to see how much further Paris has come compared to what we’ve had in the past. At the same time, there’s a lot of things that could’ve been easy wins that were missed.”

Craig Spence, a spokesman for the International Paralympic Committee, said that all relevant authorities “made great efforts” to improve accessibility for the Games. He noted that the city of Paris spent an additional 125 million euros (about $139 million) to improve access — the most any host city has invested to improve inclusion at the Games, Spence said.

When the city “was built hundreds of years ago accessibility was not front of mind. Making it all fully accessible in the seven years since it won the Games in 2017 was always going to be impossible,” Spence wrote in an emailed statement. “However what is important is that hosting the Paralympic Games has acted as a catalyst to improving accessibility and changing attitudes towards disability.”

Isolating venue seating and unpredictable buses

Outside Roland Garros, where a wheelchair tennis competition had been held, Landre used her phone to navigate to a bus stop through some sidewalks just wide enough for her wheelchair. She was heading to the wheelchair rugby game.

When the bus arrived and lowered its ramp, Landre easily boarded. She likes the buses in Paris better than the ones in London, she said, because there is more than one spot for a wheelchair user.

Fourteen stops later, Landre pushed a special button to alert the bus driver that a wheelchair user wanted to exit.

Typically, the driver lets non-disabled passengers exit first, then closes the doors, lowers the ramp (which emerges from under the bus) and reopens the door for wheelchair passengers to exit. Landre waited patiently as others left the bus. The doors closed. Landre looked toward the driver expectantly, but he did not lower the ramp. The bus took off, trapping her.

“When they close the doors the first time, you never know whether they’re about to drive off or not,” she said.

Before the next stop, Landre again pushed the button. Again, the bus driver did not lower the ramp. She started shouting in French, “Le ramp, s’il vous plaît! (The ramp, please!),” but the driver did not hear her. Finally, another woman started shouting along with Landre, and the driver lowered the ramp, letting her off at the wrong stop.

Luckily, the driver’s mistake cost Landre only about five minutes. After another 20-minute journey — a fairly smooth ride on sidewalks in her motorized wheelchair — she arrived at the wheelchair rugby stadium.

At each event, Landre sat in a special section designated for wheelchair users. People with wheelchairs were allowed to bring only one companion to the seating area, and in some venues, companions were required to sit in a separate row, preventing them from sitting next to each other at the competition.

“It’s just a really antiquated way of arranging things,” Landre said.

At another event, at the Stade de France, where para athletics have been held, a volunteer told Landre that there weren’t elevators, which forced her to use an electric stair lift, a contraption that relies on a non-disabled volunteer to slowly pull someone in a wheelchair up the stairs. For Landre, whose wheelchair weighs 350 pounds, it was a harrowing experience.

“Wheelchair users hate them,” she said. “You have to trust somebody you don’t know who usually doesn’t know how to do their job or how to strap you in … to keep you safe.”

Later, Landre learned there were elevators in the stadium. Despite the incident, she said that the Paralympics volunteers had been “great” and that she was impressed.

A Paris 2024 spokesperson said in an email that the incident was “regrettable,” adding that all Paris 2024 volunteers received training on how to welcome disabled people.

Feeling lost

Sarah Kane, 23, a legally blind American student at Cambridge University in England, said she had been navigating Paris using a white cane because it was too expensive to bring her guide dog.

Earlier this week, Kane tried to use the Métro to go to a wheelchair fencing match. A friend walked her to the platform, where station staffers said there would be workers at the next stop to help her. But when Kane arrived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt station, she couldn’t find staff to help.

Kane, who doesn’t speak French, finally found a stranger who assisted her. The whole journey took an hour.

The experience persuaded Kane to skip the Métro and use Uber rides for other Paralympic events. “When I take Ubers everywhere, it’s really easy to get around, but it’s also really expensive,” she said.

The official Paris 2024 Paralympics app features audio descriptions for some sports to help blind and low-vision fans follow the action. While the audio description services are the most expansive in Paralympic and Olympic history, they have been offered for only nine Paralympic sports and six Olympic sports.

Audio description services were not available for the wheelchair fencing competition that Kane attended. “It made it harder for me to have any idea of what was going on,” she said.

A sighted friend had to describe the match to her.

A Paris 2024 spokesperson said that expanding the audio description services was not possible “for technical reasons.”

Athletes face challenges, too

Accessibility hasn’t been a problem just for fans. Issues for Paralympic athletes came to the forefront in 2021 after Becca Meyers, a deaf-blind swimmer, dropped out of the Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021 because she couldn’t independently navigate the Paralympic Village. Because of pandemic restrictions, Meyers and other athletes weren’t allowed to bring a personal care assistant to the Games.

Whether the Paralympic Village is accessible can vary at every Games, said Matt Simpson, a blind athlete who competed in Paris for the U.S. men’s goalball team. In 2016 in Rio, Simpson said, the remote village made it difficult to get around. In Tokyo, self-driving buses made it easier, but a bus hit one visually impaired athlete who escaped with cuts and bruises.

Sometimes, Simpson said, navigating “is super easy and it’s like, ‘I can totally do this by myself.’ And sometimes it’s like, ‘Nope, I am not leaving my hotel room by myself.’”

The village can be challenging for blind athletes who must learn new routes and spaces, said Brad Snyder, a blind three-time Paralympian who has competed in swimming and paratriathlon for the United States. “I don’t want to spend effort to try to figure out navigating a new spot. I’d rather focus on my racing,” he explained.

A Paris 2024 spokesperson said the athlete village is “the most accessible ever created for a Games” and called it a “barrier-free environment.” The village features high-contrast color signage and tactile signage to help blind and low-vision athletes navigate their surroundings, as well as walkways free of obstacles and crosswalks with audio signaling. There is also a straight route from the dorm to the cafeteria.

Noah Hanssen, a U.S. wheelchair fencer from Maryland, said that for wheelchair users, the village has been mostly accessible, even while parts of the city haven’t been.

“There haven’t been that many opportunities for me to go into the city,” Hanssen said. “But I know if there’s something that I hadn’t done before and wanted to do, I’d have to be a lot more particular about planning it out.”

Finding solutions

Snyder, who is also an athlete-director on the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s board of directors, said the host committee for the Olympics and Paralympics this year has been more thoughtful about accessibility than past committees.

Intel, which is an official sponsor of the Games, worked with the International Paralympic Committee to provide an app that helps blind people navigate the United States’ high-performance training center in Paris independently.

The app features maps of the interiors of the center’s buildings, and users can hold up their phone cameras while they move around to get audio directions from one location to another, such as “one o’clock,” “continue” and “left turn.”

The app itself relies on a 3D environment mapping technology called lidar (light detection and ranging) to scan indoor buildings and spaces, as well as artificial intelligence and Intel processors, which enable the scans to be done more quickly.

For this year’s Games, the app has been available only at the high-performance training center and the International Paralympic Committee headquarters in Bonn, Germany. But Jocelyn Bourgault, programs lead of the Intel Olympic and Paralympic Games Office, said the hope is to learn from these Games and implement the app more widely in the future.

Another official sponsor, Toyota, provided wheelchair e-pullers for athletes, which can turn their manual wheelchairs into power wheelchairs that don’t need to be pushed.

“It’s probably the coolest accommodation I’ve ever seen at the Paralympic Games because the distance between the dorms and the eating area is about 500 to 600 meters [about 550 to 650 yards], and if you’re doing that five or six times a day, that wears on the body,” said Justin Phongsavanh, a Paralympic javelin thrower for the United States.

Room for improvement

After the Games end, a big question is whether French society will continue to become more inclusive for people with disabilities. Plans have been announced to make the Métro accessible at a cost of 15 billion to 20 billion euros ($16.65 billion to $22.20 billion). “Although this could take 20 years to complete, the fact the Paralympic Games triggered this announcement is monumental,” wrote IPC spokesman Spence.

Grace Wembolua, a member of France’s wheelchair basketball team, grew up in Paris and relied heavily on public transportation. She is a double amputee and able to walk with prostheses, but often grows tired going up and down stairs. It wasn’t until she moved to southern France as a teenager that she realized how inaccessible the city is.

While Wembolua acknowledged that officials have made efforts to improve accessibility, she wants to see the country take disability rights and access more seriously. Attitudes need to change, too, not just infrastructure, she said.

“I hope that we use this time to actually put a light on this issue,” she said. “I truly think that disability should be more of a concern in French politics.”