Disability Guidelines and Sports Articles

The guidelines set forth by AP and RTC articulate very specific (and often contradictory) ways of writing about a person who has a disability. They state that the writer should not refer to the disability unless it is pertinent to the story. The person should be focused on, not the disability. The person should be living with the disability, not suffering from it. And the person should not be considered as a superhuman for living with the disease, merely a person going about his or her everyday life. Regardless of my personal opinion of the guidelines, I have seen many articles succeed in following them and many that fall short. Where I think writers fall shortest of those guidelines, however, is with stories focused on sports figures.

In 1998 at the Goodwill Games, Chinese gymnast Sang Lan was performing a warm-up vault when she miscalculated where she was in the air and landed directly on her head. After being rushed to the hospital, doctors determined that the damage done to her spine was irreversible and, at least until further medical discoveries arose, she would be paralyzed from the waist down. Sang spent 13 weeks in the hospital until finally being able to leave, although she would permanently be in a wheelchair. Multiple articles were published about Sang’s accident following the event. One article in particular was published by the New York Times. It detailed Sang’s journey as an athlete up until her accident. However the focus of the article was not on the actual event- it was, instead, an emotional build-up of her emotional story as an athlete (being taken from her family at age 6, training every day for hours on end, finally reaching the highest level, etc.) just to have it all taken away from her when she became paralyzed. The article, as many others did, focused on how her dreams were taken away from her and her life would never be the same because she would now be living with a disability.

The issue with this is that the writers of sports pieces often portray the person as being an athlete and only an athlete, not a person. So when they do become disabled and cannot participate in their sport, they are portrayed as though there life is now over. When I looked through the articles following Sang’s accident, words like “devastating” and “catastrophic” were used more often than not. But putting so much emphasis on one’s sports career ending because of a disability is identifying that person as their disability in a fairly obvious way- something that goes against the “person first” guideline. They are portrayed as being defeated because they can no longer continue in the sport, yet the guidelines state that the writer should not depict a person as being held back by their disability. I think it is fairer to focus on the person and how they are living with the disability instead of focusing on how the disability affected one part of their life.