The flame is lit again: Paris promises historic Paralympic Games

(France, 24th) – This will be the first time that Paris will host the Paralympic Games, an event that did not exist in the first two Olympic Games in the City of Lights, and the goal is to host the Paralympic Games in style with a football theme. Blind people at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, wheelchair tennis at Roland Garros, paratriathlon on the Seine, equestrianism in the gardens of Versailles and archery at the Invalides, to name just a few of the sports that will be offered again at the 2024 Paris Olympics, this time with an adaptation.

The event will see more National Paralympic Committees participating than ever before: Eritrea, Kiribati and Kosovo will be represented for the first time, bringing the total to 167, just one of the records set.

While it won’t be as gender-equal as the Olympics, female participation will be at an unprecedented level: 1,983 female athletes, or 45% of participants, surpassing the 42% milestone set for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

There will also be a large number of neutral athletes: 88 Russians and 8 Belarusians, three times the number of participants in the Olympics, which led to the refusal of the head of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, Valeriy Sushkevych, who did not miss the Games. There was an opportunity to emphasize that Russia is launching a fierce offensive against Kiev in retaliation for Ukrainian advances in Kursk.

There will be no new sports, but two debutants from Tokyo 2020 will be returning: Para-badminton and Para-taekwondo, which, like their Olympic counterparts, will be held under the glass canopy of the Grand Palace.

Transgender athlete’s first

The 2024 Paris Olympics will also mark the first time a transgender athlete will compete in the women’s category. This is Italian Valentina Petrillo, 50, competing in the 400m sprint in the T12 category for the visually impaired.

Unlike World Athletics, which completely bans athletes who transition after male puberty, World Para Athletics (its Paralympic counterpart) only requires a limit of 10 nanograms of testosterone per litre of blood at least one year before starting competition, the same standard that allowed the International Olympic Committee to admit New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The number of athletes participating in the Olympic and Paralympic Games is also increasing.

Australian table tennis player Melissa Tapper, who has had one arm paralyzed since birth, will be aiming for her third consecutive summer doubles title after competing in the 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Now he is joined by Brazilian Bruna Alexandre, also a table tennis player who had to have her arm amputated when she was a few months old due to severe bleeding. Alexandre has already participated in two Paralympic Games, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, where he won a silver and two bronze medals, but this year he made history by earning a spot on the Olympic team.

Three-time Paralympic medalist Hunter Woodhall will also be doing it again, with the world coming to his aid of his wife, Olympic long jump champion Tara Davis Woodhall, but this time she will be the fanatic and right-hand man while he looks for the chance to speed up the podium.

Other athletes competing at the Olympics, such as Brazilian sprinter Gabriel Garcia, will now compete in para athletics and para triathlon as mentors to fully visually impaired athletes, with full rights to stand on the podium and win medals, under the rules of the Games.

Among those returning to Paris two weeks later was Frenchman Nacer Zorgani, who was the in-house announcer at Paris’s Nord Arena, one of the boxing venues at the Olympics. Besides being an unforgettable baritone, Zorgani, who is blind, is also a judo J2 competitor.

Stars who should not be ignored

Petrillo, Tapper and Alexander will be the three athletes who will take the spotlight due to the special circumstances, but there are also some favorites for the 2024 Paris Olympics, such as the outstanding German long jumper Markus Rehm, a three-time Olympic champion and nine-time world champion who holds an extraordinary personal record of 8.72 m, which only eight traditional athletes have been able to surpass.

Also of note is Briton Ellie Challis, a quadruple amputee who many remember as the girl wearing a “cheetah” (special prosthetics for Paralympic sprinters) who beat former South African athlete Oscar Pistorius in an inspirational event, but who has now become an accomplished swimmer with 10 world medals, including three golds and a silver, at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The must-see list also includes the Spanish swimmer Teresa Perales, owner of 27 Paralympic medals, Britain’s Sarah Storey, the country’s most decorated athlete with 28 medals, including 17 gold medals, won in both swimming and cycling, the 27-year-old Dutch tennis player Diede De Groot, winner of 23 Grand Slam titles and two Paralympic gold medals, and the “Silver Bullet” Marcel Hug, the Swiss with six Paralympic gold medals (four of them in Tokyo), world marathon record holder and winner of the six most important 42 km races on the calendar.

Among the Latin American athletes, Omara Durand of Cuba stands out, who will seek the speed trifecta for the third time in her career: 100 m, 200 m and 400 m flat, and Gabriel Araujo, the Brazilian swimmer who was born without arms and whose legs are not yet fully formed, but who can propel himself through the water with a dolphin-like movement thanks to incredible abdominal movements, won 5 gold medals at the 2023 Santiago Para Pan American Games and added 6 more world championships and two Paralympic titles.

Like Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez, who is competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics while seven months pregnant, Paralympic archer Jodie Grinham of Great Britain will take to the shooting line at Les Invalides at 28 weeks pregnant.

The city is ready

Paris, a centuries-old city, is not a friendly destination for people with limited mobility, with its cobblestone streets, uneven access between carriages and platforms on several metro lines, and limited availability of elevators and escalators at public transport stations.

However, the Paralympics will be the perfect excuse to advance the goal of making the City of Lights a more accessible city.

The local government’s director of sports, Pierre Rabadan, has ensured that 73% of sports facilities in the French capital are accessible to people with wheelchairs or other physical limitations, with the goal of increasing that proportion to 93% in the next two years.

The organizing committee also promised that the Paralympics would serve as a bridge to “a more inclusive and accessible society for all,” in the words of president Tony Estanguet.

International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons of Brazil highlighted France’s investment in accessibility goals: 1.5 billion euros over three years, including 1.25 billion euros in Paris alone. “The reference here is to Beijing, which took seven years to get through this period,” Parsons said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The leader added: “If we compare with seven years ago, the transformation is incredible. There are very few cities in the world that have fully accessible buses and trams.”

The president of the Ile-de-France region, Valerie Pécresse, acknowledged on Monday that the metro debt would persist for some time as she announced a project of more than 15 billion euros that would take at least 20 years to make the “13 historic lines” of the Paris metro barrier-free.

However, for areas where accessibility remains to be improved, a large part of the compensation will be the responsibility of the Olympic volunteers, who are trained to address the challenges that arise in the Paralympic Village and at competition and training venues.

While travel remains a challenge, visibility will no longer be a challenge in expanding the global reach of the Games after the International Paralympic Committee reached an innovative agreement with social networks YouTube and TikTok, a move that increasingly contributes to the universalization of the most successful cause of all: the Paralympic movement.