Was I wrong to boycott the Paris Paralympics?

This morning, I asked myself a question that, in these hyper-polarised times is, I think, very healthy: did I get it wrong?

At the start of the Paralympic Games, I announced that I was boycotting the event and would not watch a minute of it. Yes, the sport would be brilliant, and Team ParalympicsGB would impress the world with their performances. But I thought our mendacious politicians would use the hatful of golds coming home to falsely claim that all is well in disabled Britain when it is not.

I stuck to my guns, too, more or less. But it wasn’t easy. I’m addicted to big, multisport shindigs. I kept an eye on the medals table and followed news reports about wheelchair basketball, rugby and tennis (I’ve played them all). But even as our medals tally rose, I did not watch.

When the Games came to an end this weekend, ParalympicsGB had come second in the medals table, behind only China. We beat the United States, even when you reorder the rankings by the overall number of medals, as they do, rather than the number of golds. We beat the French hosts. We beat the Australians. That’s a lot for us to be proud of.

Was it the best ever Games? That might be pushing it. The 49 golds that GB won was an impressive haul – but it was 64 in Rio. We have finished second in every Paralympics this century, except, ironically, for the home games in London, where we came third.

But, to my surprise, these Games have prompted people to start talking about disability matters other than sporting. For disabled passengers, the Paris Metro isn’t any better than ours; indeed, it’s one of the worst in Western Europe for wheelchair access, with fewer than 10 per cent of its 320 stations fully wheelchair-accessible.

At last night’s closing ceremony, amid all the self-congratulatory speeches by Paralympic dignitaries about the power of sport to unite us and change the world, the president of the International Paralympic Committee, Andrew Parsons, offered an unusually astringent aside: “The best Paralympic legacies are those that continue after the Games, and I call on everyone involved to make the dream of an accessible Paris Metro a reality.”

There was much talk of “legacy” after London 2012 – but that conversation came to a screeching halt quicker than the police cars rushing to the latest stabbing in Stratford. How long will it be before disabled Parisians start wondering if things are ever going to change for the better in their city?

Getting around London in a wheelchair on public transport is still akin to an episode of Survivor in which the challenge is to cross a swamp. Just look at what happened to one of our greatest Paralympians, Tanni Grey-Thompson, when, making her way to Paris, she was first forced to “crawl off” her train at King’s Cross.

The governing Labour Party indulged in the de rigueur “good luck to our Paralympic athletes” messages on Twitter/X but had nothing to offer ordinary disabled schmos during the election campaign. Its delphic silence is quietly scaring the life out of an awfully large number of us.

If it could rouse itself to offer a scintilla of hope that things will improve for disabled Britons, that really would represent a meaningful legacy.