Ticket barrier

Olympics fans won't have to be quizzed about their disability to get tickets. Good news? Peter White's not certain

The word “special” has always caused trouble in the disability lexicon, especially since “inclusion” became an article of faith.

Special schools, special educational needs, special weeks designed to raise awareness – it all smacks of separatism, and a failure to treat us as normal.

The problem comes when “additional” provision is needed to gain fairness and equality. Then what?

The latest tangle involves LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games), with its arrange­ments for providing tickets for disabled spectators who want to watch the games.

The “two-for-one” formula is quite well known in sports and arts events: you buy a ticket, and if you need some­one to assist you either to get around or enjoy the performance, you get their ticket free. This, you could argue, is “special” provision and, up to a point, it’s what’s happening at the Olympics. If you’re a wheel­chair-user you need not a seat but a space, and a seat beside you for your person­al assistant; and that’s being done on the two-for-one basis. So far, so good!

But as far as someone with any other kind of disability is concerned, sight-, hearing- or learning- related, the organisers are making a virtue of the fact that there’s no “special” (and by implication, demeaning) provision, no special phone­lines, and no special questioning about the nature of your disability. That, apparently, is a virtue.

But there’s a snag. Getting an Olympic ticket, as we all know, is a gamble. You make your application, selecting the events you want to see and the price you’re prepared to pay, and then hold your breath! Fair enough; same for everyone.

Except it isn’t, because if you’re disabled and want a free ticket for your assistant, you have to gamble twice, first for your own ticket, and then for the fact that there’ll be a second ticket at that event, on that day.

And given the prices of some of these tickets (let’s gloss over for a moment the thousands of seats being allocated to local councils and sponsors, etc) this is a big gamble.

What’s the answer? Some think it would have been fairer to have a fixed alloc­ation of tickets for disabled people and their assistants, regardless of disability, with everyone applying on an equal footing. But, if you did that, it would come under the evil umbrella of “special” provision. The problem is, of course, that “special” provision costs money, and that when people spend money, they want to know, especially now, that it’s going to the “right people”. Do you know what? I’m glad I don’t have to solve this one.