With eye-catching venues, inspiring athletes, thrilling sports and a historic curtain-raiser on the Champs-Élysées, the 2024 Paralympic Games promise to be every bit as spectacular as the recent Paris Olympics. Here’s a guide to the 11-day sporting extravaganza that opens Wednesday and runs through September 8.
Let the moveable feast resume. The second act of the Paris Games kicks off on Wednesday night with the Paralympics opening ceremony, a first-of-its-kind outdoors celebration on the French capital’s iconic Champs-Élysées.
Over the following 11 days, some 4,400 athletes with disabilities, permanent injuries or impairments will compete for 549 medals across 22 sports, in what has been described as the biggest, most ambitious and most innovative Paralympics to date.
“There will be a before Paris and after Paris for the Paralympic movement,” the head of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), Andrew Parsons, told reporters on the eve of the Games, hailing a turning point for parasports.
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Opening ceremony
A month after Paris played host to a hugely ambitious – and much discussed – Olympics opening ceremony on the River Seine, the French capital will again make history with another outdoors curtain-raiser, this time on the iconic Champs-Élysées and the adjacent Place de la Concorde.
Theatre director Thomas Jolly, who also oversaw the Olympics opening ceremony, has highlighted the symbolic importance of staging the event in the heart of Paris, a city whose underground transport network is notoriously ill-suited to the needs of people with disabilities.
IPC chief Parsons described the choice of venue as the French capital “giving this gigantic hug to our athletes, embracing the paralympic movement".
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The Paralympic venues
After the Paris Olympics earned rave reviews for their eye-catching venues, the Paralympics will showcase many of the same sites – which have been adapted to make them more accessible for people with reduced mobility.
The spectacular Grand Palais transitions from fencing to wheelchair fencing, archery site Invalides switches to para archery, Grand Slam venue Roland-Garros hosts wheelchair tennis, and equestrian returns to the Château de Versailles for para equestrian events.
The stands will be unusually hushed at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where beach volley makes way for blind football, in which blind or visually impaired players use keen ears to manoeuvre a ball containing rattles, while para triathletes will plunge from the nearby Pont Alexandre III – provided the Seine is clean enough and the currents are not too strong.
“We’ve got some monstrous iconic sites, and we’re going to get an eyeful,” France's para triathlon champion Alexis Hanquinquant told AP. “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. I think we’re going to have some pretty exceptional Paralympic Games.”
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Are there any tickets left?
After a slow start, ticket sales have surged in the run-up to Paralympics, passing the two-million mark on the eve of the opening ceremony – the second highest total at a Paralympics, behind the London Games in 2012.
Organisers said there remained some 500,000 unsold tickets as of Tuesday.
The best-selling events are blind football, taekwondo, track cycling, shooting, triathlon and equestrianism, with the venue sometimes accounting for a sport’s popularity.
In the run-up to the Paralympics, organisers put more tickets on sale for the most in-demand events, including those taking place at the Grand Palais and on the grounds of the Château de Versailles – which ranked among the most popular venues during the Olympics as well.
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What sports are specific to the Paralympics?
Paralympians will compete in 22 sports, only two of which – boccia and goalball – do not have an Olympic equivalent.
In goalball, which resembles handball and is played indoors, teams of visually impaired or blind players use their hands to score goals with a ball containing bells. Athletes must wear goggles to block their vision completely.
In boccia, a sport similar to bowls or pétanque, players throw or roll leather balls as close as they can to a small ball called a jack.
Other sports include para powerlifting, wheelchair rugby and sitting volleyball. Compared to the previous edition of the Paralympics in Tokyo, 10 medal events have been added to give more opportunities to female athletes and those with high-support needs.
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Who can compete?
Paralympians are defined as having “an underlying health condition that leads to a permanent eligible impairment” – which can be caused by the likes of cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, amputations or reduced sight.
To ensure fair competition, athletes are grouped by type of impairment – physical, visual or intellectual – and how much of an impact it has on their ability to compete.
Physical impairments are further divided into eight categories, including impaired muscle power, impaired range of movement, limb deficiency and short stature.
Some sports, like para athletics and para swimming, have competitions for athletes with every type of impairment, while others, like goalball, have just one category.
The different categories are defined by a prefix and a number. The SH1 category, for instance, is for rifle shooters with lower limb impairments like amputations or paraplegia who can hold their gun without difficulty and shoot from a standing or sitting position.
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Stars to watch
Para shooter Avani Lekhara, who won the 10-metre air rifle gold in the SH1 category in Tokyo, is one of many star athletes hoping to defend their Paralympic titles in Paris, along with Iran’s sitting volleyball star Morteza Mehrzad, a two-time gold medalist and the second tallest man in the world at 2.46 metres (8 ft 0.85 in).
Italian fencer Bebe Vio, who lost both her legs and her forearms after contracting meningitis as a child, will aim for a third consecutive gold in wheelchair fencing, while para powerlifter Sherif Osman of Egypt is going for his fourth gold medal in Paris.
American multi-sport specialist Oksana Masters won a hand-cycle road race and time trial at the Tokyo Paralympics, and she will be looking to add to her career total of seven gold and 17 medals overall in both summer and winter events.
Local favourites Hanquinquant and Nantenin Keïta, the French flagbearers, will carry the host nation’s hopes in triathlon and athletics respectively, and wheelchair tennis legend Stéphane Houdet will aim for a fourth Paralympic gold aged 53. The hosts also hope to end Brazil’s unbeaten run in blind football, which stretches back to the first tournament in Athens in 2004.
(With AP, AFP)
