The Paralympic Sponsorship Gap Nobody Is Talking About: Who Gets To Be Marketable?
By Jillian Curwin | Contributed to by Alana Nichols
Viewership numbers for each passing Paralympic Games are rising, breaking records, and it is not just the media taking note. Companies are paying attention too, and it is evident in the increase in sponsorship and partnership opportunities for both the Paralympic Games and the Paralympians competing each cycle. With this increased attention comes increased visibility, awareness and recognition not only for the brands but for the Paralympians and the Paralympic Movement as a whole.
With the rise of social media there has been a pivotal change in the approach to brand marketing across all industries. According to Forbes, “Many consumers no longer trust conventional advertising. We’ve moved into an era where consumers are firmly in the driver’s seat, calling the shots on how they want to be contacted, engaged with and sold to.” Younger people especially are turning to social media for their own product research, seeking out information about the product from consumers who have bought it for themselves. In response, brands are establishing partnerships and sponsorships with influencers and creators who have a built-in audience that trusts them, their judgments, and their opinions. These relationships often go both ways. In addition to an uptick in revenue from product sales, brands get recognition, trust and loyalty from which they can build upon. The influencers and creators, who are, in essence, brand ambassadors, gain reach, visibility, and opportunities to continue to grow their platform and identity as an individual and as a brand.
Becoming a Paralympian comes at a great financial cost. According to a report published in 2024 by the Commission On The State Of U.S. Olympics & Paralympics, “...The net cost to athletes, on average, to participate at the highest levels of our Olympic and Paralympic sports pipeline and pursue international competition is $12,000 a year.” Most countries' governing bodies sponsor their athletes, therefore providing the necessary funding. Team USA is one of the only countries that is not sponsored by their government. In other words, as stated in the report, “This means that our top athletes must pay for the privilege of competing under our flag.” Speaking with Alana Nichols, a Paralympic wheelchair basketball player and alpine skier representing the United States, she had to piece together the necessary funding through fundraisers and other means in order to reach her first Paralympic Games. Since then it has improved, as Nichols points out, with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) offering stipends and performance bonuses when possible, and in 2018 the USOPC announced that US Paralympians and Olympians will now earn equal payouts for medal performances, but it often was still not enough. Now, through more brands becoming official partners and sponsors of Team USA, it has gotten easier for athletes to finance their careers, but these opportunities are not necessarily equal.
First, as Nichols noted, it is much more difficult to find a partnership or sponsorship until after an athlete medals. She herself did not get her first brand partnership until she won her second medal in 2010. Second, those being offered sponsorship and partnership opportunities are not being fully inclusive of the disability community. Rather, through the lens of representation, there is a case to be made that brands and corporate partners are, perhaps unconsciously, leaning into the disability hierarchy.
What is the “disability hierarchy”?
Disability hierarchy is a social construct that is often discussed within the disability community but does not have one definite definition. For the purposes of this piece I will be using the definition given by Dr. Sami Schalk’s, a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as stated in her article “Wounded Warriors of the Future”. She defines “disability hierarchy” as “the differential cultural valuation of disabled people which uses multiple social norms to distinguish between types of disabled people.” This hierarchy exists in different contexts, including the media.
This hierarchy touches all parts of society that people with disabilities engage in, but the media is one of the most prominent entities to put it on display. The media, including sports media, tends to feature the more “desirable”, “acceptable” or “more easily understood” types of disability, disabilities where even their non-disabled audiences can see and feel represented by. In other words, the media will highlight, showcase, include the disabilities they perceive to be the most digestible to a wide audience (in the case of the Paralympics, millions of people).
Each of Team USA's corporate partners is given an allotted number of athlete partnership spots, and how brands fill those rosters says a lot about how they perceive disability. According to Nichols, brands weigh prior athletic performance, medal potential, and marketability when selecting their ambassadors. And marketability, it turns out, is neither considered nor applied equally across types of disability.
Wheelchair users, athletes of short stature, and those with invisible disabilities, such as visual impairments and cognitive disabilities, can often perceived as less marketable than their ambulatory peers, not because of their athletic achievements, but because of how disability has historically been represented or, more accurately, not represented, in mainstream media and advertising. It is a cycle: limited visibility creates limited familiarity, and limited familiarity makes brands hesitant to invest. The result is a roster that, even within the Paralympic movement, reflects a narrow slice of the full span of human diversity.
This increased representation is not just a feel-good metric. It is an audience strategy. Brands that go deeper into the team roster, telling stories from across the disability experience with the same creative investment they bring to any other ambassador, are not just doing the right thing. They are reaching some of the most loyal, highest-spending consumers in sport, who have simply been waiting to be seen.
Toyota offers a compelling example of what this can look like done well. As Nichols notes, the global Olympic and Paralympic partner has built a team of ambassadors across a wide range of abilities and gone further still, offering engineering expertise to Paralympic athletes, co-creating adaptive equipment, and treating inclusion as innovation rather than obligation.
As sponsorships for Paralympians continue to grow, the opportunity for brands and media is clear: go wider, go deeper, and tell the full story of what disability looks like. Not just the version that feels most familiar or acceptable.
Articles Cited:
https://www.paralympic.org/sponsors
