Making Paralympic history: Giles Long on bringing para sports to the masses By Heather McLean, Editor Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - 14:42
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Lexi being used in the stadium at the London 2017 IPC World Athletics Championships
Channel 4's coverage of the 2012 London Paralympics was for many the first time para sports were explained in a way that meant the viewer could really engage with the athletes and their achievements.
The reason for this was Lexi, a groundbreaking info-graphics system that gave viewers a series of colour-coded human-shaped icons on the screen that showed the classifications of the athletes in their events prior to each race, taking away the confusion around who was racing and why, and opening up the enjoyment of the competition instead.
The man behind Lexi is Giles Long MBE, a Paralympic gold medallist swimmer who came up with the idea for a simple way to illustrate para-sport classification.
Fair in the eyes of the viewer
The original concept for Lexi occurred to Long when he was competing in the Sydney Paralympics in 2000. He explains how: One of my teammates, a guy called Sascha Kindred, was racing in the 100 Breaststroke against a Chinese swimmer called Baoren Gong. The race was absolutely head to head, neck and neck coming into the last five metres.
Long explains that Gong has no arms while Kindred is affected down one side of his body with cerebral palsy. The issue came about simply in the way the two athletes finished the race due to their disabilities. Long continues: The way the BBC edited the race at the time was they only showed the final seven metres of it because everything was happening in highlights, because it was in Australia. It comes down to the final two feet [of the race] and of course, Sascha whips his hands out to touch the wall, whereas the Chinese guy has to touch the wall with his head, and Sascha wins the race.
Giles Long at the Homecoming Parade in London 2004 post the Athens Paralympics
When we got home, everyone just kept telling me, wow, wasn't that Chinese guy amazing?', and really what they were saying was they thought the race wasn't fair. That's what it boiled down to. I thought, well, if you think that race isn't fair, do you think that about my race? I don't want you looking at my gold medal thinking, did Giles win this because of the way the rules are written?'.' I thought this sport isn't going to grow if people don't understand it.
Understanding a sport is the only way to fully engage with it, and to appreciate the efforts of the athletes, Long says: People engage with football because every single eyeball watching the screen understands every single second of what is going on. If you understand every single second it means you feel completely justified in forming your own opinion.
Being able to express an opinion and feeling that it's a credible opinion is a whole new level of engagement rather than just watching someone and effectively someone saying, I know it doesn't look fair, but it is, just accept it'. All you're going to get from that is people will be inspired, but they'll only ever be watching on a superficial level. I thought, we've got to explain this to people; we've got to explain why these categories are fair'. My dad's a graphic designer and he always used to say to me when I was growing up, if you've got a lot to say in a short space of time, use a picture'.
Birth of Lexi
This is the point where he began to come up with the idea for Lexi: I just thought it was obvious; we can have these little human characters on screen, colour them in traffic light colours to show which parts of the body work and which parts don't, and we could just explain to people, this is why a seemingly different looking group of people are put together, and explain it in a sporting context, and we could do that in seconds and the viewers would understand what the class is before the race is run.
He says there had always been a lot of resistance to talking about disability in para sport at that time because people did not want to point out the differences in people but instead to just talk about the sport. He adds that, the ironic thing in paralympic sport is if you don't talk about the disability up front, as a commentator you spend all of your time having to back reference the disability because otherwise your comments don't make sense as you haven't established a framework for what you're talking about .
A Lexi full frame still from the 2018 Commonwealth Games
He suggested his idea to the BBC in 2004, and didn't get anywhere, then again in 2008, and didn't get anywhere . Then when he was trying to become a presenter in 2012 for Channel 4, in a meeting with the executive producer things changed.
He explained: The exec producer said, by the way, we've committed to explaining classification and that's one of the reasons why we've won the bid to screen the Games, have you got any ideas?' and I just said, well yeah, funnily enough I do'. I drew it for him with a biro on a notepad and said it works like this, these characters come up and this is what the voice says', and because I'd been thinking about it for so long I knew exactly how it worked.
We still had to overcome every single hurdle; there was a still a large contingent of people within the para sport community who still had that whole thing of don't talk about disability' and that understandably caused a lot of nervousness at Channel 4, Longo continues. In the end what it came down to was Channel 4 saying they had said they were going to crack this [classification explanation] and this is going to be the way we're going to do it.
Channel 4 commissioned Long to devel
