End of term?

It was the moment everyone had been waiting for. British cycling fans had stayed up into the early hours to watch Sarah Storey's final race at the Paralympics - and they were not disappointed. Crossing the line ahead of the pack in the C5 road race, the 43-year-old claimed her third gold medal of the games. With it, she broke the record of 16 golds held by swimmer Mike Kenny since 1988.

Even more astonishingly, her achievements have been in two completely different sports. Born without a functioning left handHer hand was injured by becoming entangled in the umbilical cord in her mother's womb., she started out as a swimmer, winning six medals - including two golds - in the 1992 Barcelona Paralympics, aged just 14.

Sadly, this did not save her from being bullied at her school in Manchester. She remembers being a "walking conversation-stopper" for girls who talked about her behind her back. At 15 she developed an eating disorder and became painfully thin. Nevertheless, she triumphed again in Atlanta in 1996, winning three more golds.

"When you win five gold medals before your 19th birthday, people assume you're invincible - but I ended up with chronic fatigue syndromeA long-lasting condition in which the sufferer feels extremely tired.," she told Cycling magazine. Despite this, she won four more silvers and a bronze at Sydney in 2000 and Athens in 2004. But a year later ear problemsWater getting into the ears can cause hearing difficulties. which could have led to deafness forced her to retire from the pool.

To keep fit, she took up cycling - and within a year had broken the para-cycling record for the 3,000-meter pursuitAn event in which two cyclists race against each other, starting from opposite sides of the track.. She won two gold medals in Beijing in 2008, four in London in 2012, and three in Rio in 2016 - making her the most successful British female Paralympian ever.

She has also shown that she can beat top non-disabled cyclists. Her time in the individual pursuit at Beijing was faster than all but seven competitors in that year's Olympics. She won the same event at the 2008 and 2009 British championships, and in 2010 was selected for the English team at the Commonwealth Games.

But her biggest achievement, she says, has been returning to world-beating form after giving birth to two children - her daughter Louisa, now aged eight, and her son Charlie, three. Since Charlie has never been to the Paralympics, she plans to compete again in Paris in 2024.

Storey's achievements are so remarkable that some think it ridiculous to refer to her as disabled. They suggest that superpowered would be more to the point.

But there is a wider debate about whether anybody should be called disabled - or described by any word beginning in dis or dys. In words of Greek origin, the prefixA letter or group of letters placed at the start of a word, as opposed to a suffix, which comes at the end. dys means bad, difficult, impaired or abnormal - as in dyslexicHaving difficulty with reading or spelling. Lexis is a Greek word for speech.. In Latin, dis can mean either working in two ways or lacking something.    

Campaigners argue that such words present as much as 15% of the world's population in a negative light, and set them unfairly apart from the rest of the community. They feel that terms such as "people with disabilities" or "differently abled people" are preferable.

Is it time to drop the word disabled?

Some say, yes. The way we talk about people inevitably influences how we think about them: referring to "the disabled" defines them as unable to do things and excluded from ordinary life. Instead, we should emphasise what they can do, which - as Sally Storey superbly demonstrates - is all the more impressive because of the challenges they have to overcome.

Others argue that changes in terminology are just cosmetic and simply reflect the linguistic fashions of the moment. You cannot wish away the difficulty and pain of disabled people's lives by pretending that they are part of humanity's big happy family. It is far more helpful to emphasise what they have to deal with, as the Paralympics do. Terms like "differently abled" are hopelessly clumsy.