The 24th of August marked the start of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic games and the 16th summer Paralympic Games since they officially began in 1960. The first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960 saw over 400 athletes with impairments and disabilities take part. Now, with 539 medal events across 22 sports, over 4,000 athletes will be competing to win one of the prestigious Paralympic medals.
To find out who was tuning in to this year's Games, we took a deep dive into the avid followers and engaged audiences of the Paralympics in the UK. Check our out results below.
Mainstream Sports Fans
The two largest tribes in our study, UK Paralympics Fans and Team GB Enthusiasts, represent the wider audiences within the general population who are following the Paralympics and Team GB. Top influencers included a number of popular sports personalities, such as British Paralympic wheelchair athlete David Weir CBE and sports broadcaster Clare Balding OBE, both of whom have received national recognition for their contributions to sport. The broad nature of these tribes reflect how the games have become a point of unity and national pride, hence why so many mainstream Brits are engaging with the Paralympics.
Disabled Community
Our study provides supporting data to suggest that the Paralympics resonate with and fully engage a wide range of disabled people. The third-largest tribe within the study indicates clear associations with the disabled community, with support charity Scope and disability lifestyle magazine Able indexing amongst the top influencers. Military Veterans also emerged as the fifth-largest tribe in the study, whose interests included the Royal British Legion and the Invictus Games for sick and injured service personnel, representing a key community engaging with the games.
Sports Enthusiasts
A significant portion of the study relates to a variety of individual sports enthusiasts, from skiing to equestrian, cycling to sailing and everything in between. As the Paralympics is a grand stage for so many sports, it is no wonder that so many passionate sporting fans tune in every four years to cheer on Team GB’s “superhumans”.
The Paralympic Games are an internationally recognised and loved sporting event that appears to resonate with every type of sports fan across the UK, irrespective of disability. The key tribes that emerged from our findings are indicators of this fact, and provide data that conclusively shows a high engagement with the disabled community.
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