LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

By Radar Staff

They gave us the Beatles, the Stones and Zeppelin; and we're paying them back with Kim, Kourtney and Khloé!

Yes, the Kardashians have invaded the U.K. to film for their mega-hit E! reality series, and on Monday, Kourtney's baby daddy Scott Disick showed off a Superbad look, flaunting a paisley fur coat while taking in an overcast London morning.

PHOTOS: Scott Disick Warm In Fur On U.K. Morning

The debonair Disick, 28, wore the ostentatious garment over his traditional blue blazer suit as he left his London hotel.

Disick, the six-year partner of the oldest Kardashian daughter Kourtney, has a son, Mason, with her, and a daughter on the way. He recently opened a New York restaurant called RYU.

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Beijing 2008

The statistics were impressive: an £86m budget, 4,000 athletes and a haul of 89 medals for the hosts, who topped the table.

But many believe the real significance of Beijing's Paralympics lay in the less easily measurable task of changing attitudes towards China's 83 million disabled citizens.

Four years on, campaigners and scholars say the effect of the games was noticeable, and not only because of new facilities such as the wheelchair lifts at subway stations.

"Thanks to the Paralympics, the Chinese public are now actively learning about disabled people, rather than, as previously, being horrified by and rejecting them," said Qian Zhiliang, professor of special education at Beijing Normal University. "I think the impact will be long term: the public has realised they are able to do things and have rights just as everyone else does."

Zheng Xiaojie, the secretary-general of the Hong Dan Dan centre, an organisation supporting the blind in Beijing, agreed: "People have realised they have abilities. They were shocked to see that people without legs could swim, for example."

But some warn that Chinese coverage highlighted a tendency sometimes evident in previous Paralympics: striving to combat dismissive stereotypes by promoting an equally unrealistic image of disabled people as heroes, rather than equals.

Zheng said the effect of the 2008 event was merely a "seed" that still needed to be nourished by the government and society.

Some discrimination remains, according to Yang Renliang, a 25-year-old from Shenzhen, who is albino and visually impaired.

He planned a career as a civil servant until he realised he would not pass the physical examination. "At job interviews, people always think disabled people are less capable and I was obviously rejected because of my appearance," he said .

"The public still tends to label disabled people as being less educated and of lower morals, and see us as incomplete, unhealthy and even abnormal."

He recently wrote to the ministry of human resources, urging them to tackle civil service discrimination by removing unreasonable requirements from the physical examination and earmarking positions for disabled people.

In theory, all government departments, businesses and institutions must ensure that at least 1.5% of their staff are disabled, or pay a fine. In practice, that is widely ignored.

Campaigners say the problems faced by disabled people reflects a wider lack of understanding of rights and discrimination issues in China. It is common for job adverts to specify the sex, age and even physical attributes of the candidates being sought.

Yang said some of the facilities put in place for the Games had been abandoned; others were not properly installed or were never really suitable for the people supposed to use them.

Stephen Hallett of the UK-based charity China Vision, who is visually impaired and has worked in China for many years, said: "There was an effort to make Beijing more accessible, and that was extended to other cities, but there wasn't a process of consultation.

"There must be millions of kilometres of tactile paving put down at vast expense and, if you ask any Chinese blind person, they will tell you they don't use it because there are obstacles everywhere across it.

"If you consult people, they will say: forget the tactile paving; what we need is mobility training."

In Britain, as in China, the impact of the Paralympics will depend on the priorities of organisers and their willingness to listen to disabled people.

"There were people in the government, particularly in the Disabled Federation, who saw it as a golden opportunity to raise awareness and change attitudes. For the whole government, the priority was to present China in the best possible light," said Hallett.

Additional research by Han Cheng

Sydney 2000

The Paralympics in Sydney 12 years ago are widely regarded as having set the benchmark for the competition. Record crowds gave enthusiastic support to competitors from 123 countries, also a record.

At the opening ceremony, 87,000 fans roared as Australian champion wheelchair athlete, Louise Sauvage, lit the Paralympic flame. For many, Sydney marked the time and place when Paralympians genuinely became part of the Olympic movement.

"When Australia had the Olympic games, it extended that support to the Paralympics and they got a lot more emphasis than they had done previously," said Sydney-based sports historian and author, Richard Cashman,

For 40 years, the Paralymics had been the poor cousin. They had only been held in the same city as the Olympics four times since their inauguration in 1960, and often at a different time.

Atlanta in 1996 was a debacle. A shambolic handover from the Olympics left competitors in the US city deflated and angry. Sydney was determined to be different and the Olympic and Paralympic committees worked together, promoting one big festival of sport.

Garnering public support was key. Schools and community groups were targeted in the years before the Games in an effort to raise awareness.

"They saw that young people's minds could be shaped and wanted them to view the athletes as role models," said Paralympic swimmer Denise Beckwith, who was an ambassador for the Games and won a bronze medal in the pool.

"I spoke to lots of kids as part of their school curriculum and it allowed me to quash many myths about disabled people," said Beckwith, who has cerebral palsy. "The children actually saw me as a person rather than a person with a disability."

More than a million spectators attended (double the figure of Atlanta), including 320,000 schoolchildren, but Michael Bleasdale, the executive director of national advocacy group People With Disability, said opportunities were lost, despite all the success of the competition itself.

"Around the time of the Paralympics, there was a much greater understanding around disability that came mostly from the media," he said. "But there's been a serious decline in the reporting of disability issues since. Disabled people are rarely heard because they're not approached and because their view is somehow seen as hopelessly biased and uninformed."

Dr Simon Darcy, the associate professor of sports, events and tourism at Sydney's University of Technology Business School, agrees that the benefits were transitory. "The bubble that the elite sports people live in is a very different environment to what people will go back to dealing with on a daily basis," he said.

"Mainstream disability funding continues to be a story of unmet need, with more demands than resources,. The cutbacks that the disabled community in the UK have had to face won't be front and foremost when politicians are lauding the athletes at this summer's Games."

Bleasdale and Darcy said Sydney missed opportunities to build long-term infrastructure for disabled people. While the venues themselves and the transport at the Olympic site were widely seen to have been exemplary, away from the spotlight, it was a different story.

"Many athletes were able to board trains near their venues but couldn't get off somewhere else at the end of their trip," said Darcy. He said this would also be a big challenge for London.

Twelve years on, fewer than half of Sydney's railway stations have wheelchair access – although RailCorp says 80% of train journeys are to or from those stations with access.

London's Paralympics will no doubt bring many sporting records but, if Sydney's experience is anything to go by, disability rights campaigners say a lasting legacy beyond the sporting stage may be too much to wish for.