“Can I please have a ramp with that Gold Medal?”: Colombian Paralympics and the Prosthetic Lim(b)inality of Nation

Abstract

In their article “Come Together: Sport, Nationalism, and the Media Image,” Rowe, McKay, and Miller argue that: “There is surely no cultural force more equal to the task of creating an imaginary national unity than the international sports-media complex” (133). Casual reflection on the World Cup of 2006 in Germany, which left Germans imbued with an unthreatening sense of national identity for the first time in decades; the 2012 Summer Olympics; and, importantly for this paper, the Paralympics that followed them in England, which left a depressed and cynical population aglow with a sense of accomplishment and potential, would seem to confirm this view, and this in contexts and populations whose nationness would seem to be well established. More compelling confirmation of the power of sports in crystallizing national sentiment comes from places that only enjoy a more tenuous claim to nationness. My focus in this essay is on some of the ways in which the sports-media complex in Colombia co-opts the performances and victories of the so-called disabled athlete in an effort to represent a more inclusive national sentiment. On the one hand, we are witnessing a real attempt to symbolically expand the purview of the nation, following its iteration in the Constitution of 1991 as a diverse community of difference. It would seem that the Paralympic media is a cultural force capable of creating imaginary national unity.