'Disabled access to sport must be improved'

Asked why Visa sponsors Paralympics, Colin Grannell, executive vice president of Visa Europe, said the reasons for are the same as for Visa sponsoring the Olympic games "it is about elite sport," he said. "Of course, the question at the beginning was to know whether we would get a good return for our business investment by doing it, because the media attention for the Paralympics is lot less than for the Olympics. However, we decided to do this over the long term and I think that in the future we'll see the Paralympics become much bigger." 

Grannell also explained that there's a change operating in sponsorship. Before, companies were happy to see their brands displayed in events or so, but now, "competition in business means that your brand and your business need to stand out and mean something to general public. One has to see these large corporates do something real in terms of supporting the society. Just brand-exposure is not enough." However, he believes it is very complicated for corporates to get involved in sport sponsoring, because "in order to get involved, you need to understand the hierarchy of sports politics, the sports governing bodies, the issues they manage and the committees and sports bodies that generate the athletes and the sport".

MEP Chris Heaton-Harris, president of the Parliament's Sports intergroup: "The whole idea of meetings like the one held today is to build a network. We, the MEPs represent hundreds of millions of people across the EU. A small minority of those have disabilities and yet go on with life. We have here today two Paralympic athletes telling us what can be achieved with determination and a little bit of help. And, hopefully, by networking all these different groups of people together, we can make it slightly easier for other people in similar situation to achieve what these two athletes have achieved."

Regards the EU's upcoming White Paper on sport: "I'd like to think that it will talk about accessibility, which is a very important issue, not only for disabled athletes but also for women and kids across Europe," said Heaton-Harris. 

Asked whether one should, in general, legislate or 'incentivise' in sports: "It is really difficult to find the right balance. Sport is one of these strange things that you could easily snuff out if you cause it too much problems because it is basically created, staffed and run by volunteers and participated at individual level by most people. So it is a very difficult thing to legislate for. But it would be great if we could improve accessibility to sports.