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Text 5. Phantom travellers




 

Despite the fact that explorers and great travellers tend to be hard-headed and practical, many of them have sensed a ghostly companion on their travels. Marco Polo was one of the first to describe this. During the thirteenth century, he crossed the Lop Nor desert on the way to China, and told the following spooky tale: ‘When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him stop and lose touch with his companions... then he hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they call him by name...’

Other explorers have also written about this feeling. Despite the failure of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic journey – his ship broke up in the ice the written account of it, South, has become famous. T S Eliot was inspired by it when he wrote The Wasteland. Shackleton wrote: ‘I know that during that long march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers it often seemed to me that we were four, not three.’

Explorer Steve Martin and his two team mates even made ‘the fourth man’ an official member of the party when they were crossing Greenland! Even though there were only three men on the expedition, they felt a fourth presence who always walked to the left of the party. They called him Fletch and he even got into the record books. ‘It was a bit of a joke,’ Martin says, ‘but having a fourth member along meant you could always blame something on Fletch!’ despite feeling his presence constantly, Martin never actually saw Fletch. It is unlikely that so many serious explorers were lying. Were their minds affected by the difficult conditions experienced during their travels or could there be another mere mysterious explanation?

 

Text 6. The Paralympic Games

 

6.1. What do you know about the Paralympic Games?

6.2. Read the bold words and their explanations. Give their Russian equivalents.

6.3. Read the text and answer the questions after the text.

 

The Paralympic Games are a major international multi-sport event where athletes with a physical disability compete. Athletes with disabilities did compete in the Olympic Games prior to the arrival of the Paralympics. The first athlete to do so was American gymnast George Eyser in 1904, he had one artificial leg. Hungarian Karoly Takacs competed in shooting events in both the 1948 and 1952 Summer Olympics. He was a right-arm amputee and was able to shoot left-handed. Another disabled athlete to appear in the Olympics prior to the Paralympic Games was Liz Hartel, a Danish equestrian (1) athlete who had contracted polio (2) in 1943 and won a silver medal in the dressage (3) event.

 

The first organized athletic event for disabled athletes that coincided with the Olympic Games took place during 1948 Summer Olympics in London, United Kingdom. Dr. Ludwig Guttmann of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, who had been helped to flee Nazi Germany by the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics in 1939, hosted a sports competition for British World War II veteran patients with spinal cord (4 ) injuries. The first games were called the 1948 International Wheelchair Games, and were intended to coincide with the 1948Olympics. Dr. Guttman's aim was to create an elite sports competition for people with disabilities that would be equivalent to the Olympic Games. The games were held again at the same location in 1952, and Dutch veterans took part alongside the British, making it the first international competition of its kind. These early competitions, also known as the Stoke Mandeville Games, have been described as the precursors (5) of the Paralympic Games.

 

Vocabulary notes.

 

(1) a rider or performer on horseback

 

(2) an infectious viral disease that affects the central nervous system and can cause temporary or permanent paralysis

 

(3) the art of riding and training a horse in a manner that develops obedience, flexibility, and balance

 

(4) a long, thin, tubular bundle of nervous tissue and support cells that extends from the brain

 

(5) a person, animal, or thing that goes before and indicates the approach of someone or something else: The first robin is a precursor of spring.

 

 

6.4. Answer the following questions.

1. Did athletes with disabilities compete before the appearance of the Paralympics? Give examples.

2. Who organised the first games for disabled athletes? Who participated in them?

3. What was the first international competition of this kind?

 

 

Text 7. The will to win

Athletes, if they want to reach the top of their chosen sport, have to train hard for hours every day. Their commitment to the sport and their achievements certainly deserve praise. This is true for both able-bodied athletes like Karl Lewis or Linford Christie, and for disabled athletes like Isabel Newstead, who carried the United Kingdom flag at the Barcelona Paralympic Games in 1992.

 

“We want to be recognised for our achievements, just like any other top class athletes. We are not interested in hearing how brave and wonderful we are,” says Isabel. “We are demonstrating our abilities in an environment where our disabilities don’t count.”

This shows that disabled athletes can only participate in a small number of events, and are unlikely to take on more sports in the near future.

Another disabled athlete, Chris Holmes, is a swimmer with gold, silver and bronze medals won at the Paralympics. He is blind and has to count his strokes to judge when he will reach the end of the pool, but this doesn’t lessen his speed. Competition among swimmers is so fierce that the

difference between the record times of the disabled and able-bodied in the 50-metre freestyle swimming event is only four seconds. With results like these, more andmore spectators have been attracted to the Paralympic Games.

The opening ceremonies and most of the wheelchair basketball games were sold out long before the start of the Atlanta Games. This is quite interesting if you bear in mind that in many past events, tickets had to be given away to attract spectators. This new interest is especially pleasing for Bob Steadward, president of the International Paralympic Committee, whose job is to promote greater awareness of and more participation in the disabled version of the games.

“I wanted to ensure that developing nations had the opportunity to send athletes to Atlanta,” says Steadward. “As a result of the money we had, and the money we received from the ICC International Olympic Committee, we were able to sponsor more than 100 athletes from 35 countries who would otherwise not have had a chance to come.”

More and more sports are being added to the Paralympic Games as the range of the athletes’ skills and abilities becomes known. Sailing had not been a Paralympic sport before, but Andrew Cassell, the captain of the British sailing team, helped it to be included. He was born with the

lower part of both his legs missing, but he never let this get in his way. He started sailing when he was ten years old and since then he has proved himself time and time again by winning races and even breaking world records.

So far, there are events for the blind, amputees, and people with cerebral palsy as well as wheelchair sports. Atlanta is the first Games to include mentally disabled athletes competing in swimming, as well as track and field events.

Many of the athletes have suffered accidents and illnesses, which would be enough to make most of us want to give up. But they are pushing back the barriers, which, until recently, kept the disabled from taking part in sports. They are the ones who are catching the public eye and

imagination, changing people’s perceptions of what ‘disability’ means and what extraordinary abilities the so-called disabled people possess.

 

 

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