The Paris Paralympics begin on Wednesday with a spectacular opening ceremony in a city still on a high after the highly successful Olympics.
A new generation of Paralympians will join seasoned veterans competing in many of the same venues that hosted Olympic sports.
A total of 18 of the 35 Olympic venues will be used for the Paralympics, which run until September 8, including the Grand Palais which scored rave reviews for its hosting of the fencing and taekwondo under an ornate roof.
The Games will open with a ceremony in Place de la Concorde, the square in the centre of Paris where skateboarding and other ‘urban’ sports took place during the Olympics.
The Paralympic flame was lit at Stoke Mandeville hospital in England, the birthplace of the Games, and brought to France through the Channel Tunnel.
Theatre director Thomas Jolly, who also oversaw the Olympics opening ceremony, said there was a deep symbolism in putting the Paralympics ceremony in the centre of the French capital — a city whose Metro system, in particular, is completely unadapted to the needs of wheelchair users.
“Putting Paralympic athletes in the heart of the city is already a political marker in the sense that the city is not sufficiently adapted to every handicapped person,” Jolly said.
The Paralympics though always have a far wider message than simply sport and International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons told AFP earlier this year he hopes the Paris edition will restore the issues facing disabled people to the top of the list of global priorities.
Parsons believes the Games “will have a big impact in how people with disability are perceived around the world”.
“This is one of the key expectations we have around Paris 2024; we believe that we need people with disability to be put back on the global agenda,” the Brazilian said.
He argued that disability had fallen behind sexual and gender identity in recent years.
“We do believe people with disability have been left behind. There is very little debate about persons with disability.”
