Jessica Long, a Paralympic swimmer, remembered feeling invisible at a large gathering with the news media in Chicago ahead of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. She sat in a corner with two other American Paralympians, watching reporters interview their Olympic counterparts without paying any attention to the three of them.
But now, Long said in a recent telephone interview, she finally feels as though she is on a level playing field with the Olympians. The United States Olympic Committee voted last week to change its name to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Before the vote, the national Paralympic Committee had been a division of the national Olympic Committee since 2001. The United States is one of four countries that house the Paralympic and Olympic Committee within the same governing body.
“We’ve arrived,” said Long, now 27, a four-time Paralympian whose lower legs were amputated early in her childhood. She has won 23 medals. “When I was on the Beijing team with my friends, we were like: ‘Do you think we will ever get to that point? Do you think people will ever recognize Paralympics?’ For it to be in the name, it’s a huge, huge step.”
Brad Snyder, one of three athletes on the U.S.O.P.C. board of directors, said he had tears in his eyes when he voted in Chicago. A Paralympic swimmer who is now training for triathlons, Snyder said he was overwhelmed to be part of the moment.
“It wasn’t the Paralympians in the room driving this,” said Snyder, 35, who served in the Navy and lost his eyesight after an explosion from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. “It was everyone else, and that’s what made it so powerful.”
Over the past two and a half years, the committee has been involved in a series of scandals, including the revelation of years of sexual abuse by Lawrence G. Nassar, a doctor who worked for U.S.A. Gymnastics and received the equivalent of a life sentence last year.
The committee’s chief executive, Sarah Hirshland, was appointed last summer in an effort to turn things around. She has been credited as the driving force behind the merger.
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