ABSTRACT
This final chapter establishes what happened that caused the London 2012 domestic media coverage to bring a marginalised group into the mainstream. It ties together that the regulatory structures protected and enabled the taking of production risks; that the inclusion of staff with disabilities positively affected disability representations; and that it was the coherent vision led by marketing, utilising the full force of brands and branding, that successfully promoted new meanings about disability, repositioning undesirable difference as acceptable within the mainstream. The riskiest of approaches was adopted, athletes were given parity with normal humans, and the producers projected them into the mainstream culture. This chapter summarises why Channel 4 chose to do that, who decided, and what happened. This leads on to a discussion of the Paralympic media legacy that has been omitted from the research agenda so far and what this might mean for the future of media representations of sport, and of others, whatever their differences.
