That's a big question, but a very good one, because it touches on a couple of items.
The two international organizations that govern us, the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and the IPC, the International Paralympic Committee, have had an open discussion about this, particularly under the banner of what I would call “inclusion”. For many, many years the model of “same as same as” would mean the games would be imbedded or integrated, so they would be at the same time, with the same framing all in. I would say we've had an avid discussion over the years, and we've probably evolved to a point now where—given the specificity of each of the sports in their own right, the number of events, and the fact that each event, including the number of athletes involved, is very large—even at an operational level it would be very difficult to do. You would have to cut down on sports, on athletes, on the games themselves, and on opportunities, so in fact the games would become much smaller with less opportunity to compete.
Particularly for the Paralympics in their own right, I'm going to say that the sport, the movement, and the very strong decision to promote Paralympic sport in its own right, with its own set of games, have many other benefits. Top of the list would be the number of athletes and countries that can participate in the games, and also present athletes in their own right. We like to say our games are no different from the Olympics, certainly in terms of the athletic prowess and the training and the degree of commitment our athletes have and certainly in terms of that platform of exposure to have that opportunity with the Paralympics.
The only other point I would make would be on the broadcasts, and I alluded to that a little bit earlier. There's a lot of activity around the Olympics, and then there's far less during the Paralympics, and that's what I referred to earlier. We decided that wasn't acceptable. You made a comment about the London debrief, and in fact Channel 4 in London was a groundbreaker in the amount of coverage it provided.
If there was one lesson we learned, aside from all the other lessons from London and Vancouver that we will take into Sochi, it was that we're not going to have what happened to us in the previous games ever happen again, where the exposure was maybe a highlights package at the end or maybe a half hour. We've bought the rights, we've created a media consortium, and we are going to have unprecedented coverage here in Canada, which I hope will be the banner and set the bar for what is to come, not only for Sochi, but for 2015 and for Rio thereafter.