China’s Paralympic domination fails to ignite enthusiasm back home

Beijing: As the Paris Paralympics enters its final day, China’s athletes are enjoying rampant success and are almost 100 medals ahead of their nearest challengers — but few in the country appear to be paying attention.

The Olympics were watched widely, with victorious Team China athletes lauded as national heroes, and nail-biting medal table rivalry with the United States closely followed.

But this week, under a news post announcing China now had more gold medals than the United States and Great Britain combined, many users on social media platform Weibo complained that too few people cared.

“Not enough people pay attention to this. It feels like there has been very little coverage (of the Paralympics) on TV,” read one comment.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, which holds the rights to the Paralympics, has aired events live on its two free sports channels.

But wider coverage has been modest compared to the Olympics.

Low attention

“There’s more media coverage than there used to be,” Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports analyst, told AFP.

“But when you look at Chinese news websites these days, Paralympic sports are sort of buried.

“There’s the odd headline here and there, but it’s not really getting much coverage.”

The hashtag “Paralympics, low attention” has been viewed over 100 million times since September 2, with many lamenting the lack of primetime attention devoted to the Games.

On Saturday, of 24 scheduled programmes on CCTV’s main sports channel, only six were broadcasts of the Paralympics — and seven were Olympics repeats.

“CCTV is always airing replays of the Olympics,” one social media user complained.

“If you want to watch the Paralympics it’s quite difficult.”

The dip in public awareness and engagement in the Paralympics has been a source of debate in other countries too.

“I remember in the UK a few years ago, (broadcaster) Channel 4 only aired one single hour of coverage for the whole Paralympic Games,” said Dreyer.

“Whereas now they have hours and hours of live coverage.”

Some countries’ Paralympians have become major celebrities.

“Gabrielzinho” — Brazilian swimmer Gabriel Geraldo dos Santos Araujo — has become a national hero after winning three golds.

In China, Olympic stars continue to attract far more attention than their Paralympic counterparts, with top athletes’ faces still plastered on billboards across the country.

Olympic swimmer Pan Zhanle, the 20-year-old who broke the 100m freestyle world record and took gold in Paris a month ago, now has 2.4 million followers on Weibo.

‘Who is watching?’

In contrast, Lu Dong, a Paralympic swimmer who broke the world record in the women’s 50 metre butterfly S5 event and has won four golds, has just 5,300 followers on the platform.

After teenager Jiang Yuyan, the most successful athlete at the Paris Paralympics, won her seventh gold with a world record in the 100 metre backstroke S6 event on Saturday evening, there was barely a ripple of attention online.

“Honestly, who is watching?” asked one user on Weibo, echoing many who expressed their disinterest in the events.

“It takes a while” to generate interest in para sports, Dreyer pointed out, especially since people with disabilities are not particularly visible in China and are poorly integrated into the workforce.

While the topic “How many world records has the Chinese Paralympic team broken” had received more than four million views on Weibo by Sunday, that online interest pales in comparison to other recent sporting events.

After China’s men’s football team lost a World Cup qualifier 7-0 to Japan on Thursday, a related hashtag racked up over 600 million views.

Earlier in the week, Olympic tennis gold medallist Zheng Qinwen’s defeat at the US Open drew over 17 million views on the platform.

“China is performing great at these Paralympics. So why is the interest so low?” lamented one Weibo user.

“When it’s a movie or music star getting cosmetic surgery, then everyone talks about it.”