TV Host Sophie Morgan Wants to Change How Disability Is Viewed While Covering the Paralympics: ‘You Better Be Ready’ (Exclusive) (2024)

Sophie Morgan is on a mission to change the way disability is reported on in the U.S. — and she’s starting with the 2024 Summer Paralympics in Paris.

The English TV host, 39, came to Los Angeles after the pandemic for another job opportunity and connected with Keely Cat-Wells — a disability rights advocate who founded (and has since sold) the disability-focused talent agency C Talent — to see what opportunities existed for her as a host and broadcaster in America.

Although Morgan had transitioned from working exclusively on disability-focused programming to mainstream programming in the U.K., (she worked on ITV’s hit talk show Loose Women) — she couldn’t find many promising broadcasting opportunities in the U.S.

Alongside Cat-Wells, she set out to create opportunities for herself and other disabled talent.

Morgan — who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 18 years old — has had experience in sports broadcasting since 2012, when she was a member of the Channel 4 team that aired the Summer Paralympics in London. She went on to become the lead host for Channel 4 during the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro and beyond.

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So, when searching for opportunities for herself and other disabled talent in U.S. broadcasting, she began with NBC and the Paralympics.

“It took us four years to get there, but we got there and the intention with that mission was not just to try and open a door for me to see if I could maybe be a presenter in the Paralympics here in the U.S., but actually open the doors for other disabled talent too, which is what we did,” Morgan exclusively tells PEOPLE.

Morgan will host the 2024 Summer Paralympic Games, reporting from NBC’s Connecticut studio. She’s part of a team of many disabled broadcasters who will report for the network during the Paralympics, which will air on NBC Sportsand Peaco*ck. She also helped train some of her other team members and a portion of them will be reporting live from Paris.

“I'm so excited about that because that talent was already there. It was just waiting to be plucked out and used,” Morgan says.

It’s one step of many on her quest to change the way disability is represented and reported on in the U.S.

Morgan recalls being in awe of Channel 4’s “Meet the Superhumans” 2012 promotional campaign for the Paralympics the first year the more liberal network took over broadcasting the event from the BBC.

She tells PEOPLE changed the way she viewed herself as a disabled woman and the way that the U.K. saw the disability community. “It changed my life,” Morgan says of the campaign, although she acknowledges that today, many disabled people believe that referring to a disability as anything like a superpower is problematic.

She adds, “It changed my perception of myself. I started to own my disability in a way that I hadn't before, and it made me proud in a way I had never felt before.”

Morgan's also excited to have helped build a team of disabled talent who could potentially help other people with disabilities watching the Paralympics at home have a similar transformative experience.

The fact that disabled hosts and reporters are going to have a say in the way the stories of disabled athletes are being told is the key to progressing disability representation on screen and in media.

Morgan acknowledges that there is sometimes a thin line between “inspiration p*rn” and inspiring stories about disabled people.

“Inspiration p*rn” is a term used in the disability community to describe content that objectifies disabled people by presenting them as extraordinary for participating in activities of daily life or being seen as “overcoming” their condition. The term can also be used to describe content frames a non-disabled person helping a disabled person or treating them equitably as a “humanitarian act” or something to be overly celebrated, per the National Association of County Health Officials (NACCHO).

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“I'm not into inspiration p*rn. I'm really not. I don't like us sharing our stories just to inspire non-disabled people,” Morgan tells PEOPLE. “But I love, love sharing examples of ways in which disabled people shouldn't be limited by people's perceptions. And the Paralympics does a great job at helping break down those perceptions and shift them.”

Some of the Team USA athletes competing in the 2024 Paralympics that Morgan will be rooting on include Ali Truwit, who is an amputee after a shark attack in 2023 and is now a Para swimmer, and Tracy Otto, who will compete in Para archery for the first time in Paris after she survived “a life-threatening domestic violence attack, which caused the loss of her left eye and paralysis from the chest-down,” per her official athlete bio for the Paralympics.

These Paralympians and more have achieved something extraordinary within the disability community, not in spite of their disabilities. The Paralympics and its athletes have launched a campaign to make it clear that people will be “competing” at the events and that it is incorrect to say they are “participating.”

Morgan says that having disabled broadcasters tell athletes stories is important to prevent coverage from moving into an “exploitative space” that non-disabled journalists are sometimes unaware they’ve moved into.

The businesswoman and advocate has high hopes that the team she helped assemble to cover the Paris Paralympics is just the beginning of changing disability representation in the U.S. “It's been a journey and it's ongoing, but the end goal is LA28,” she tells PEOPLE. “It's a huge, huge moment for our home games in the U.S.”

Morgan’s vision is to “blow the Paralympics out of the water” at the 2028event in Los Angeles and hopefully use the Games as a way to shine a light on the ways that infrastructure in the country can change to help improve all aspects of life for disabled people.

“I'd love that to be what happens with the U.S. and the power that the U.S. would have. Oh my gosh, with Hollywood there and so much power in that city to influence change,” she says.

Sophie Morgan’s Fight to Fly, her documentary about the challenges the disability community often faces while flying, recently premiered on U.K’s Channel 4 — and she’s using her company Making Space to create more opportunities for people with disabilities to work in TV and film.

Morgan has a message for industries that have underserved the disabled community in the past that she hopes the world sees not as a threat, but as an opportunity to energize and mobilize in service of people they’ve largely excluded.

“We are not going anywhere. We are coming — and so you better be ready," Morgan says. "And if you're not, we're going to make space. We're not going to stop."

To learn more about all the Olympic champions and Paralympic hopefuls, come topeople.comto check out ongoing coverage before, during and after the games. Watch the Paris Paralympics, beginning Aug. 28, on NBC and Peaco*ck.