Legacy of Mega Sporting Events for People with Disabilities

There is very little published work that has investigated event legacies in terms of the Paralympic Games (Misener et al., 2013). This is despite the fact that, in many ways, the Paralympic Games, and their forerunners the Stoke Mandeville Games, were founded with the aim of providing a positive legacy for people with disabilities Through the lens of ableism this chapter highlights some of the legacy claims made for previous Paralympic Games before looking in more detail at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 summer Paralympic Games. Overall the chapter highlights that the Paralympic Games does have agency in the sense that it provides a platform from which to engage in debate about disability issues, but that political, economic, and cultural specificities within a host country can all work either for or against the legacy process in many complicated and often unexpected ways.