TV Reviews : ‘Other Olympians’ Simply a Story About Winners

“The Other Olympians” (on Channel 28 at 6:30 tonight), profiling four athletes who competed in the 1988 World Winter Games for the Disabled in Innsbruck, Austria, is not about idealizing the disabled.

It’s about world-class athletes in an International Olympics Committee-sanctioned event, striving to be the best, regardless of blindness or missing limbs.

Diana Golden, a gold-medal skier who lost her leg when she was 12, rejects the stereotype of the disabled as “brave, courageous and overcoming”: “We’re here because we’re competitive and we like to win,” she says.

Golden, Rick Riley and Bill Henry of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and Miguel Perez Tello of Spain’s Disabled Ski Team praise the indisputably worthy Special Olympics held each year for the developmentally and mentally handicapped, but they want us to understand that it has no connection with their event.

“When we talk about it among ourselves,” says Henry, who lost the use of one arm after being struck by a car, “we talk about the ‘Olympics,’ not the ‘Disabled Olympics.’ ” Henry and the other competitors train year round; their sport is their life’s work.

Produced by Wendy Battles, an editor for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” this award-winning documentary can be uncomfortable at first for those of us who are “temporarily abled.” The athletes’ matter-of-fact presentation of the hows and whys of their lives, however, refutes the initial images of human fragility. Their strengths remind us to consider our own.