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The participation of Macau athlete Zhao Haolei in the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games may encourage more women with disabilities to take up sports in Macau, the director of Macau’s Special Olympics organisation said yesterday.
Chio, 17, will travel to Paris today where she will be the only athlete from China’s semi-autonomous region to compete in the Paralympics, competing in the long jump for athletes with intellectual disabilities. The director of the Macau Special Olympics stressed that this is the fourth time that a Macau athlete has received a special invitation from the organization to compete in the Paralympics, but Chio is the first woman to be selected.
Hetzer Siu Yu Hong said he believed the choice was made out of a gender equality policy, recalling that the 2024 Paris Olympics would be the first attempt to have an equal number of male and female athletes.
The leader defended that, thanks to Chio Hao Lei’s participation, “at these Paralympic Games, women with disabilities can see that if they participate in sports, they have the opportunity to reach the highest level in the world”. Hetzer Siu acknowledged that “most disabled athletes are men” and that “more efforts need to be made to encourage women with disabilities to take up sports”.
While stressing that this “is a challenge for the whole of Asia”, the director of the Macau Special Olympics said cultural factors in Chinese culture remained obstacles, including the view that “only women with white skin are beautiful and have no muscles”.
The 37-year-old organization originally worked to promote sports for people with intellectual disabilities and now focuses on providing education and training for people with disabilities to enter the job market.
For people with disabilities, “the first concern is how to live in society, and the second is learning, which is very important in Chinese culture,” Xiao said.
While lamenting the difficulty in attracting disabled people to participate in sports, the leader said he hoped that after the Paralympics, China’s Special Olympics would also serve as “an opportunity to encourage citizens to take up sports.”
Eyes on the podium
As part of the Special Olympics China, which will be held from December 8 to 15, 2025, Macau will host two badminton events, one for people with physical or hearing impairments and one for people with intellectual disabilities.
Xiao said that Special Olympics has 22 training sessions per week, with 100 to 120 users regularly participating. It was during these training sessions that Jiao Haolei’s talent began to emerge.
After finishing sixth at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, last October, Chio told Lusa he was going to Paris for more than just attendance. The young woman will compete in the Paralympics on September 6 and she still has three jumps to make before reaching the final jump to qualify.
“My personal best is 4.25m, but I want to reach 4.5m. I’ve done that in training but never in competition,” said Chio. As has been the case since the 1988 Seoul Games, the Paralympic competitions will share facilities with the Olympic Games, with about 4,400 athletes from 160 regions and countries expected to compete in 559 events in 22 disciplines.
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