Deaflympics Media Watch (16 November 2025)

Data collected 0900 JST 16-Nov-2025

The Games are underway — but you’d hardly know it from the world’s sports desks.

Today should have been the moment the headlines shifted from warm-up stories to actual competition: goals scored, medals won, shocks, heroics, heartbreak. Instead? Silence. And not the Deaf kind. The media kind.

Yes, the results exist. They’re sitting quietly on the official Tokyo 2025 website. They’re in federation match reports — like the USA Deaf Women smashing Japan 5–0, or the Ukrainian men putting five past the US team. They’re hidden in Japanese corporate updates and athlete sponsor pages. The wrestling brackets are fully up. The schedules are live. The data is there.

Japan Today reported on members of the imperial family in attendance at the Opening Ceremony. (Image: POOL via ZUMA press Wire)

But where are the stories?

Where is the mainstream “Day 1 at the Deaflympics”?
Where is the BBC Sport medal table ticker?
Where is the ESPN highlight reel?
Where is even one big newsroom saying “Here’s what happened today”?

This is the pattern we’re exposing: if a Deaf athlete wins, you have to dig through official PDFs and federation pages to find out. The world’s sports media aren’t telling the story. Not yet. Media access information

And that’s exactly why we’re watching.
Exactly why we’re documenting this gap.
Exactly why we’re doing this work.

Because the athletes are competing.
The results are happening.
The moments are real.
The coverage should be too.

Real sport with real results, ignored by real newsrooms.

All the details are here on the official Deaflympics2025 website

Live action via You Tube

The BBC asks questions about the Deaflympics

As Russia announced that they will be hosting the 2015 Winter Deaflympics, the BBC interviewed a discussion with former ICSD President Craig Crowley and Andy Palmer, Deputy Editor of the deaf news website The Limping Chicken.

A transcript of the radio discussion is available

They discussed:

  • The importance in difference between the Deaflympics and the Paralympics and the reason for separate games.
  • The big question : Are we Deaf or Disabled?
  • The relationship between the ICSD and the IPC and the pros and cons.
  • The concerns about ‘time running out for Deaf sport’ if it does not deal with the question about Deaflympics and Paralympics.

As with many other important questions like this, there is never enough time in a radio show to really cover everything in detail. Fortunately, the latest book on the Deaflympics,  Same Spirit Different Team  allows you to read up further on the topics raised in the show.

Image

The book is proving popular in the UK and also overseas. International readers have been having difficulty placing orders over the internet but fortunately the publishers have now been able to deal with the technical issues involved and they hope that the problem has now been solved.

The book is available to pre-order