{"id":644,"date":"2012-09-08T23:57:46","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T04:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/?p=644"},"modified":"2012-09-08T23:57:46","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T04:57:46","slug":"paralympics-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/08\/paralympics-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Paralympics 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m far more inspired by these <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/bigpicture\/2012\/09\/paralympics_2012.html\">photos from the Paralympics<\/a> than I was by anything I saw from the Olympics. There&#8217;s something much more moving about athletes overcoming physical adversity to even participate let alone win their events.<\/p>\n<p>Some highlights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>high jump with only one leg<\/li>\n<li>table tennis with irregularly formed hands<\/li>\n<li>archery with feet<\/li>\n<li>handstands without hands<\/li>\n<li>blind running<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Particular interesting are the measures taken to empower these athletes, such as guide runners for the blind, specialized prosthetics, and sports specifically designed around their capabilities (such as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Goalball\">goalball<\/a>). Also of interest is the rather sophisticated <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Disability_sport_classification\">system for describing capabilities and disability<\/a> used  to ensure that athletes compete primarily with those who have similar capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>While writing this, I started wondering whether disabled was a word I could use here, and eventually decided it wasn&#8217;t. If this isn&#8217;t an example of how physical adversity due to accident, genetics, or birth defect doesn&#8217;t necessarily &#8216;disable&#8217; someone, I don&#8217;t know what else could be. These people are clearly just differently abled to the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m far more inspired by these photos from the Paralympics than I was by anything I saw from the Olympics. There&#8217;s something much more moving about athletes overcoming physical adversity to even participate let alone win their events. Some highlights: high jump with only one leg table tennis with irregularly formed hands archery with feet\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/08\/paralympics-2012\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644\/revisions\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}