Disability Sport Info
Disability Sport Info
Paris 2024 Paralympic Games: LEXI classification system
In this special episode, I speak to Giles Long, founder of the LEXI classification system. LEXI (https://lexi.global/) communicates the Parasport classification system in a clear and simple manner.
During our chat I discover why and how LEXI was invented, what makes LEXI unique, and the best ways of communicating the Parasport classification system.
Enhance your enjoyment of the Paralympics with this deep dive into the LEXI classification system.
Please get in touch with your thoughts on the episode
Thanks for listening to the Disability Sport Info show!
Transcript
00:00:29 Dr Chris Brown
I'm Dr Chris Brown. Welcome to the Disability Sport Info podcast. Today I've got a very special guest with me, Giles long, who is the founder of the LEXI system. And we'll talk about what LEXI means. But the focus of this episode is going to be discussing classification. So yeah, Giles, thank you ever so much for joining me today for this episode.
Well, you're very welcome. So as I said, the focus is about classification. But before we jump into the finer details of classification.
What is LEXI? What does it stand for? What does it mean and why is it important?
00:01:02 Giles Long
Well, I suppose you kind of have to almost sort of wind back to, you know, why does classification exist in in Paralympic sport? And it really is there to create a framework for competition in the same way that weights are there to create a framework for competition in fighting sports like boxing or judo or karate. And the idea being then that you compete against people that are of equal impairment when you are doing the sport in question.
So it's not about how your impairment affects you when you're going shopping around the supermarket. It's about how does your impairment affect you when you are playing wheelchair basketball, when you're running, when you're swimming, etc.
But because all of the sports have grown up in isolation, each sport has its own classification structure and numbering system, and that is very, very confusing to people. So where there are 29 different classification systems, LEXI is just a simple single graphical system which works on a traffic light scale to indicate areas of the body that affect it.
And what it does is it explains every single classification system and structure in a simple single way. And the idea is that we try to explain each class in the 10 seconds of attention that you can expect to get from an audience member.
00:02:30 Dr Chris Brown
That sounds very difficult. So how do you get all that kind of complex knowledge into 10 seconds?
00:02:36 Giles Long
Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to work out what is the salient impairment types that people are going to see in each class. We did a statistical exercise where now there's some sports where some classes that are incredibly simple, so a visual impairment class, you can illustrate that using one LEXI icon, so that is just one small human human diagram if you like.
But some of the classes in swimming, in particular, there could be 20 or 30 different impairment types that could qualify for that one classification. So really then what you do is we did a statistical analysis to work out what are the most likely impairment types that the audience is most likely to see.
And then we would choose one from each impairment family. So let's say, for instance, if you're going to be an S7 where you can have some kind of neurological condition. You could have people who maybe have some kind of amputee, some kind of limb deficiency. They could have various other neurological things, so you want to be able to illustrate an example of each one of those and you’ve gotta do it within a maximum of five examples. People can't absorb more than 5 examples of information.
And so that graphic shows the audience member who is in the class. And then there's a voice that comes over the top. Or if you're looking on the website, a small caption that tells you why they're grouped together. So those two things come together and tell you what the class is.
So we're looking to answer three very big questions very quickly. What, who and why?
And, critically, do that before the race starts. So that's the really important thing. People have to know what it is before the race starts and they have to know what the information is for the race that they are about to watch. It's no good trying to explain to someone in a minute and a half/ two-minute video. This is the athletics classification structure. This is the swimming. It's too complicated and people can't hold it in their in their minds.
And also I think that sports and media organisations, not media organisations, but certainly sports, often forget that people are watching their sport to be entertained. And if you start making it difficult for them then it becomes too easy for them to turn off and watch something else or just maybe they will carry on watching. But they just won't be as engaged as you hoped that they would be.
00:05:21 Dr Chris Brown
Really interesting. There's a lot to unpack, but I just wanna kind of cycle back if that's OK. So first of all, what does LEXI actually stand for?
00:05:27 Giles Long
So in the very early days, there was a lot of nervousness about explaining classification head on. So this was like, sorry, but I first had the idea for LEXI when I was competing in Sydney in 2000.
00:05:41 Dr Chris Brown
And what was your was your classification group?
00:05:44 Giles Long
Oh, I was S8and I won the 100 metre butterfly in Sydney.
But I was frustrated that at the time, people just in my race, people didn't understand why I was swimming with one arm would be racing against someone who'd be swimming with two arms. It becomes very starkly illustrated when you're swimming butterfly, where you can see two arms going over at the same time.
And so that was that. My dad had always said to me, my dad was a graphic designer, and my dad had always said to me, if you've got lots to say in a short space of time and you got to have a picture.
And so I just thought I had this amazing idea. And I thought, yeah, we could explain it graphically. We put them on screen and, you know, and anyway, no one thought it was a good idea for about 10 years until the rights until London, 2012 and really it was I, you know, I've been thinking about it for such a long time and obviously.
I was involved in the sport and I knew that the way that people who have disabilities themselves talk about their disability and people with disabilities always are very, very matter of fact about it. Ohh yeah, no. Like, you know, I lost my leg in a motorbike accident. I I was born this way. I was this that and the other.
00:07:02 Giles Long
And and I just thought what we really need and I think really what the public wants is they want to be just told what it is in. It's just a really straightforward way, no emotion involved, no pity and really just a straightforward, I suppose, effectively the same way that if you were explaining the rules of anything to someone, you wouldn't get emotional about it. You'd just say, right. Well, you know, this is the game monopoly. Whoever throws six goes first. You don't get emotional about that. It's just one of the rules.
And so I've been thinking about it for a long time, but there was still a lot of nervousness around it and so I decided to call it Lexicon Decoder, the idea being that the classification was the Lexicon of Paralympic sport, and we were decoding it. And the reason I thought, well, if I call it a name that seems like sort of slightly long-winded and strange, then people will just not really be bothered and I suppose really start making fun of it. And I really kind of thought, well, in the very early days, if people start making fun of it then we'll lose the audience and it will fizzle out. So it then became shortened to LEXI. And then that's where we are.
00:08:22 Dr Chris Brown
Interesting. So you said you had this idea for a long time and you had your own lived experiences as an athlete. How did you convince Channel 4 and London 2012 organisers to have LEXI at the forefront of trying to explain classification?
00:08:39 Giles Long
Well, I think one of the critical things was that LOCOG, the organising committee, had been really incredibly brave in that they, for the first time ever, they'd split the rights. So in every Games prior to that, if you as a broadcaster, if you bought the rights to the Olympics, you effectively got the rights for the Paralympics thrown in for free. Not quite, but let's you know near enough.
And that created an environment in the broadcasting market whereby effectively broadcasters perhaps didn't value those rights as much as they should do.
Now, in this country, we've fortunate and that we've got 2 strong public broadcasters and so the Paralympics always got a good showing, but in somewhere, perhaps, like the US, which is a straight commercial market, the Paralympics often just wouldn't get shown because they could make more money out of showing, I don't know, another episode of friends or something like that.
00:09:41 Giles Long
And so LOCOG decided to sell the rights for the Olympics and the Paralympics separately. And I think Channel 4 had slightly more money, which obviously helps, but one of their key commitments in winning the rights was to explain how classification worked in Paralympic sport. Which was like incredibly bold and brave of them.
But at that point they didn't have a nailed down concept of how they were going to do it. And, anyway, I was trying to butter them up to become a TV presenter. And just as I happened to be leaving this one meeting in particular, one of the exec producers just said to me, “Oh yeah, we've committed to explaining classification. Have you got any ideas?” And I was like, “yeah, funnily enough, I've been thinking about it for the last 10 years”.
And I drew it on a piece of paper with Biro and so then, you know, and then we went through drawing after drawing after drawing to get it right.
It was incredibly important that we created something that looked sporty, yet at the same time was standing square on to the camera. Because if you're trying to illustrate asymmetry, an impairment of asymmetry, it's no good. If you start from a base character, which is already asymmetrical.
But if you look at all sports photography, it's always asymmetrical because that's what makes it feel like it's moving. So there was a lot of a lot of drawing work went into that.
We started off and we had loads more colours and then there was then people, some people said, “oh it’s red, that feels a bit offensive. So then we have this colour scheme which was like blue, gold and purple or something like that, but then nobody knew what the colours meant. So then we went back to a traffic light model. We went up to five colours because that made it more flexible.
So we had green, light green, orange, yellow, orange, and red. But the problem with that was it was confusing. Because not only with the green and the light green and the yellow very close to each other as colours, but it also meant that you had two colours with a similar name so you had green and light green, so 3 didn't quite give enough flexibility. So that's how it how it ended up being a being a four colour model.
But then we also did loads and loads of extra design work into it as well. To do as much work for the viewer as possible.
So whenever you look at a LEXI icon, the affected part of the body will always be on the right hand side of the screen.
So they will always be presented the same way, and then when they're put into groups as well, you will always see the ones that have more yellow on the left and the ones that have more red on the right, followed by the amputees on the far right. And that is so that each time you look at it, you're we've done as much of the work as we possibly can.
And explaining it to you so that we can get that over to you in that critical 10 seconds that people are prepared to give you.
What it is that you know, what it is that they need to know?
00:12:50 Dr Chris Brown
Interesting and it sounds a very polished end product at the moment. I'm sure there are lots of challenges you've already referred to in terms of getting it to what's currently like day. So what were some of the challenges apart from what you already mentioned in terms of London 2012?
Once you introduced it, the reception to it, what worked according to the audience, what didn't work? What were your kind of take home lessons from 2012 in terms of LEXI?
00:13:18 Giles Long
Well, I suppose one of the biggest learnings that I had from the whole process was that just because you've had a good idea, you've still got to communicate that to people. And explain to them why it's a good idea. You know you've spent a long time thinking about something.
And you've refined it in your mind and then, you know, arrived at a sort of an endpoint that you then have to take people on that journey.
And the thinking pre-London 2012. I'm gonna bit of a sweeping generalisation going to say pretty much across all of disability sport was to kind of say disabled sportspeople are just sports people, so don't talk about disability. Just talk about sport.
And I get that because it's a very noble and sort of it's exactly where you instinctively feel you should be heading.
The irony of that is, is that if you don't talk about impairment types. Then as soon as athletes line up on the blocks, commentators then immediately, you just get this sense of, oh my God, this isn't fair.
So then commentators then have to rewind, and then, ironically, spend most of their time talking about impairment types or they don't address it at all, in which case the audience is just completely clueless.
And so you either end up with a whole load of, you end up with an audience where people don't understand anything, and so they're not properly engaged or you end up with a commentator, a commentator team, who spend all of their time talking about disability and in which case you haven't done the sport justice. Because, ultimately, in those pre-London 2012 days, you quite often go and do an interview after your race. And, you know, the first question would be, you know, it might be something like congratulations, you've just broken the world record in the 400. So tell us about how you lost your leg.
And trying to get people to that point where it's like we don't need to talk about that because that's already been, that's already been done. You know, we might come back to that in a sort of a bit more of a kind of a colour story later on. But ultimately, I want to tell you about how I ran an amazing second bend and that's where I destroyed the rest of the competition.
And I've been working on it really hard and I've learned from last time when I was competing and all of the stuff that people talk about in all other sport. That wasn't getting a platform.
But convincing people that therefore the best thing to do was to tackle talking about it head on, clear the decks and then allow the sport to breathe, that was one of the hardest challenges.
And it was a conversation that I had over and over and over and over. And there was a high degree of nervousness. It would be fair to say it was a high degree of nervousness at Channel 4 and indeed in ABC Australia, who also carried it in the 2012 Games.
I think ultimately what it really came down to was there was nothing else.
And I think if there had been something else, then I think LEXI might have been pushed to the side. But they sort of looked at it and tried everything.
People often used to say to me, “ohh, there's, you know, there's lots of different ways of explaining classification. And of course there are but not if you want to explain it in 10 seconds. Like, if you'd asked me like 8 years ago I'd have been like yeah, maybe there is another way of doing it.
But in all the time I've been making it, no one's come up with another way of explaining a class in 10 seconds to someone who knows nothing about Paralympic sport and get them to understand quickly.
So, yeah, it's taken what you see as the polished end result. But to get it to that point has taken lots and lots and lots of refining and working out to make sure people get what they need when they want it.
00:17:48 Dr Chris Brown
Yes, I can definitely imagine that and just a quick kind of procedural one. Are there particular sports or impairments that you find more difficult to communicate clearly to the kind of casual viewer who maybe, like you say, doesn't have much knowledge?
00:18:01 Giles Long
They fall into sort of a few different kind of categories, I suppose. So you've got the concept sports, if you like. Sports like wheelchair rugby and wheelchair basketball, where the team is built on the points score. And all you're trying to get across to people is that it, let's say it's basketball that you've got, that you're allowed fourteen points on the court at one time and there is a, you know, there's a point structure and more impaired players carry fewer points and at least impaired players carry more points.
And so what you're trying to really get across to them, I suppose if you put it in a football context, is that you've got a football team and you take a defender off, but you put an attacker on, then people could rightly understand that you have changed the dynamics of your team and you've become a more attacking side. Or if you take an attacking player off but put a midfield player on, then you're packing the midfield to try and start slowing the game down and start holding the ball more.
And it's the same in basketball, but unless you explain that concept. Then at best people will watch it and they'll be really entertained.
But they're watching it in a way of thinking. This is people in wheelchairs playing basketball, which of course it is, but it is also so much more than that and what you want to get to is so much more than that. So you've got those kind of sports which are the concept sports.
You've then got kind of the model sports, if you like, which is like tends to be more of a swimming kind of thing. And that's sort of a where you can have someone who's got an arm disability competing in it, someone who's got a leg disability, competing against someone who doesn't really seem to have a disability. And people just kind of want to know, you know, why is this group of people being put together? So you've got those.
Then you've got the what are they doing there? And that typically tends to be anyone who looks on screen like they don't have a disability. So we have huge web traffic when it comes to T38 on the track where the athletes all have very mild hemiplegia or diplegic CP, and they just they move around on the track. They look really kind of smooth and then when they run, you know, they run faster than most people could ever hope to run.
And similarly so with intellectual impairments, where people can't see them. So you you've got those.
People want to know different things about different classes. If you see what I mean, but critically, what we're trying to do is present it in a stable platform way where they know how the information's gonna be presented to them even though they're arriving to a different question.
00:21:29 Dr Chris Brown
Interesting. OK. And how would you rate the public kind of understanding of classification now compared to before LEXI came on the scene in 2012?
00:21:40
I suppose you might find the odd person who you could say to them, well, you know, do you know what a T13 is, but I suppose ultimately that's not. That's not really the question. I think really the question is do people know what classification is full stop?
And pre-2012 where an amazing statistic like something like fewer than 10% of the people in the country had even heard the word Paralympics, let alone gotten into the mindset of classification.
Whereas now if you talk to most people they would say, ohh yes, the Paralympics, where athletes they're put into groups and stuff like that.
And I think that that is I think, to be honest that's the best that you could hope for, because if people are open to understanding that that's how athletes compete.
And most people are watching once every four years and like also watching Winter Games.
And occasionally sort of other bits and pieces that come around, maybe like Commonwealth Games, but it's primarily about the Summer Paralympics. Really what you want is probably where people are currently where they understand that there is classification.
And they're prepared to take on board that information in bite size chunks in relation to the events that they are watching.
But you could never really ever expect them to go away and learn chapter and verse about, you know, sports classification because it's just it's too complicated.
Most people involved in Parasport couldn't tell you with any degree of accuracy about the classification system outside of the sports that they work in.
Because even the sport that they are in requires pretty much all of their, you know, all of their attention and their bandwidth.
So I think that, yeah, I think that that's ultimately what people want. Paralympics has come around, you know, in the same way that with the Olympics, most Olympic sports people only watch once every four years. We want to sit down, watch Paralympic sport. We want to enjoy it.
And they just want to be told in in a very brief period of time before it starts. OK, so coming up next is going to be the T38 and it's this, this and this. And then they go right and then they move and then they move away and that's that bit has been put to one side which is exactly what we want because we want people watching the sport.
00:24:29 Dr Chris Brown
OK. And in terms of the mainstream media, how effective do you think they are communicating classification in a simple and understandable way, and how do we compare some other countries do you think?
00:24:43 Giles Long
I think what the media are after and it's taken them a long time I think to sort of collectively arrive at a point. I forget name of the law is. But you know when it's kind of like first of all you have a concept, early adopters, something like that but mainstream acceptance takes about a decade.
And I think really since 2012, we're, you know, we're at that sort of mainstream acceptance point. But I think really what media outlets want is they want a centralised go to way of being able to explain classification, whereby their journalists don't need to be experts, but they can talk about it as if they are an expert.
That it's a resource that they can pull down and attach to maybe talking about an upcoming event. Talk about an athlete feature, talk about it in relation to live broadcast. That’s what they want. They don't. They want to be able to use it. They want effectively I suppose a kind of a modular central resource. I think that's where I think that's at.
And, so how well are they communicating it? A large part of it depends, in my experience, on how well that those media organisations are plugged into disability sports organisations in their country and how willing they are to be steered.
00:26:20 Giles Long
By those organisations and I mean, I think probably the two you know, I'm not gonna perhaps compare one organisation to another, but I think that probably perhaps stand out countries from this Paralympics are Ireland and Slovakia, where the two smallish countries both have teams of around 30 or 40 people.
Which does give them the luxury of being able to create profiles for each athlete and be able to really kind of give each athlete a focus.
The National Paralympic committees in both countries are incredibly well connected into their media, and they share a lot of resources and what effectively that means as well for the broadcaster is that the National Paralympic Committee is almost there as a sounding board.
Almost like a sort of IT technical helpline and that creates for a very rounded approach. And we've seen a lot of traffic on the LEXI website over this games and it'll probably be about four times as much for Paris, as it was for Tokyo and but interestingly, we're not getting a lot of traffic from Ireland or Slovakia.
Even if you look at those in percentage spike terms and the only thing I can assume is that they're doing a such a good enough job that people don't need to look.
00:28:10 Dr Chris Brown
So do you want traffic because if there is not loads of traffic, that means that people are understanding classification, but then obviously you're a business. So you want people coming to your website. Is that a bit of a catch-22?
00:28:20 Giles Long
Well, it is. Yeah, I perhaps should have said the world. Both Ireland and Slovakia both have very wide-ranging LEXI licenced deals, so they already have LEXI all over their coverage so they don't need to give the people don't need to leave to come to the website.
00:28:40 Dr Chris Brown
And finally, as you’ve been very generous with your time, what tips or best practise would you provide for communicating classifications simply and clearly?
00:28:48 Giles Long
The 6 great questions of who, where, why, when, what, how. Well, you don't need to know. Stick to answering. What the class is by telling people who are in it and why they're grouped together.
You know the when and the where is, you know well. When is now obviously, where is Paris.
How is the really difficult one to ignore. Because what, you know, how did you lose your leg? How did it come that you had cancer when you were a teenager? How did this? How did that, which and how, always used to dominate all of Paralympic sport sports chat, and it used to dominate interviews and stuff like that.
But if you're talking about classification and that tiny gap that you get before the event starts and it has to be what, why and who? And if, as long as you can stick to answering those things, then the race will unfold and it will be brilliant or, you know, there will be triumph or tragedy. And, you know, in whatever way.
And then right at the very end, you get to ask the magic question of how is it you started swimming? You know, how is it you started running?
But it has to be in that order. And that's the critical thing about explaining classification.
00:30:19 Dr Chris Brown
And just I said finally, but one more quick question cause. You just kind of prompted it.
Do you think we are better now in terms of that? How comes at the end rather than leading out in terms of the coverage like you said before, maybe when you were competing, it was often how and then actually they thought, oh, you actually are a racer, we have to talk about that whereas now is it we talk about you as a sports person?
00:30:45 Giles Long
The paradigm shift between, you know, my first Games was Atlanta in 1996 and you know, yes, not only the way that athletes are spoken to in the interviews and the kind of questions that they're asked, but also the way in which the way in which athletes are regarded.
And the way that people wanna talk about them. I mean to put it into context, because the Paralympics is smaller than the Olympics, you don't need all of the athlete village space.
And so when I was in my room and I was trying to rest up and get ready for my 100 butterfly the next day, there was, and I'm not exaggerating here, outside of my bedroom window, literally outside of my bedroom window was a crane with a wrecking ball knocking down the part of the village that was no longer needed anymore.
And I think that there was always a kind of a, I don't know, I suppose a kind of an undercurrent or a sort of a feeling that Parasport was not so much a competitive itch that had to be scratched by sportspeople. That it was really just something for disabled people to do. It wasn't sport. It was a pastime and that that has disappeared. Thank God that has disappeared.
But the important thing I think for the movement as a whole and for any kind of club organisation is that it is a project that will never be finished. You know that there is a destination on the horizon that will never be reached. You know there will always be something to fix and something to improve on. And so there's still a long, long way to go, but the distance that travelled in you know, 20 years which, you know, if you think about that in sort of put it into the context of another sport, you know.
Its growth has been utterly transformative and long may that continue.
00:33:08 Dr Chris Brown
What a lovely way to end. So, Giles, thank you so much for your time. It's been really interesting learning more about LEXI. And I now know why LEXI is called LEXI. You made the correct decision by saying LEXI rather than Lexicon Decoder.
00:33:15 Giles Long
There you go.
00:33:19 Dr Chris Brown
So yeah, well done.
And hopefully, you know, people obviously are using your website and understanding using the graphics a bit more about classification. So thank you for your time, Giles, and I'll catch up with you soon.
00:33:29 Giles Long
Thank you. Uh, we should just plug the website. And it's Lexi.global
00:33:34 Dr Chris Brown
Lexi.global. There we go. Excellent. So check it out.
If you've not had a chance to check it out because it’s a really fascinating and interesting way of explaining classifications. So again, Giles, thank you so much and we'll catch up soon.
00:33:44 Giles Long
All right. Thanks, Chris.