How this year's Paralympic Games definitely corrects the mistakes of old

The sentiment around the Paralympic Games hasn’t always been entirely positive. Even when the focus has been empowering athletes and spectators, the event’s tone has been accused of being misguided at best, patronising at worst. Historically, brand, communications and marketing have been the three guilty parties here.  

From a brand perspective, the Paralympic Games has sometimes been trivialised and treated as a lesser version of the Olympics. From a visual identity perspective, graphic elements like the emblem and pictograms have appeared as tweaked versions of the Olympic assets, with little thought given to their design. 

Channel 4 missed the mark with its 2012 and 2016 promotional campaigns that positioned Paralympians as ‘superhuman’, suggesting that there’s something heroic about being disabled. The term ‘superhuman’ was first associated with freak shows over 100 years ago. 

The team behind Channel 4’s 2024 ad, including in-house creatives and the disability-focused communications consultancy Purple Goat, have definitely corrected the mistakes of old, and now position Paralympians as elite athletes rather than people ‘doing well, considering’. But there’s still some way to go when it comes to changing public perceptions.

According to research from adam&eveDDB, people tend to use the word ‘competing’ when talking about the Olympics but ‘participating’ when talking about the Paralympics. It’s seemingly minor semantics like this that puts a chasm of difference between the two events. 

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The visual and verbal language is now evolving, with narrative around athletes ‘overcoming disabilities’ being ditched in favour of showing them as world-class elite sportspeople. 

The Paris 2024 Organising Committee played a big part here too. With an opening ceremony on the Champs-Elysées that celebrated Olympic and Paralympic athletes, with millions of euros invested in guaranteeing equal access and 45,000 volunteers trained to welcome disabled spectators, inclusivity became a strategic priority this year. 

When we designed the identity for Paris 2024, we recognised the brand would play a pivotal role in changing perceptions and closing the gap that exists between the two events. We developed a fully unified approach that brought both events together under one shared visual identity – a first in the history of the modern Games. 

The event tagline, Games Wide Open, set the tone. Paris 2024 was to be the most inclusive, sustainable and gender-neutral Games in history. Games Wide Open stated the obvious: everyone was welcome. Athletes and non-athletes, abled and disabled. 

Where previous Games had created specific disabled mascots for the Paralympics, Paris 2024 merged the two and used a symbol of the French revolution (the Phrygian cap) to celebrate change and freedom. The disabled mascot (left) ended up selling out first. For the first time since Mexico 1968, the pictograms were gender neutral, and sports, wherever possible, were represented with a single unified pictogram. 

The Paris 2024 Paralympic Games offers an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of brand and marketing, and the effect this has on perceptions. This year’s Games promise to be less about differentiation and more about unity – a celebration of sporting brilliance in action. 

Gilles Deléris is co-founder and creative director at W Conran Design, the agency behind Paris 2024. The Paris 2024 Paralympic Games run from 28 August to 8 September. 

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