From our correspondent
The day of glory has arrived. Finally. Today Paris and France are raising the curtain on the Paralympic Games with another ceremony that promises to be fiery and surprising. Almost everyone has arrived, athletes, delegations, guests and media: 1,800 accredited people (83 of them Italian), plus a thousand journalists and 800 photographers. Even the Porte de Versailles centre, where tickets are collected, is empty: “There are still very few missing”, Baptiste Angelfi, director of the centre, acknowledges the Olympic calm to solve problems and help everyone.
After two editions without spectators (Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022), these Paralympic Games are in record numbers: 167 delegations (three more than in Tokyo, with Eritrea, Kosovo and Kiribati making their debuts, there were 135 delegations twenty years ago in Athens) ) plus the refugee team, with 4,400 athletes (including 1,983 women), with three nations breaking records (China with 282 athletes, Brazil with 255, France with 237), 22 sports for 549 medal events. But the atmosphere felt in the city, the feelings linked to the city’s involvement are also new signals for the Paralympic Games that have already seen significant social change, especially after London 2012. At that time, the Channel 4 advertisement in the UK was called “We are superhuman”. Now, we are beyond that, we are in pure sport, in the beauty of the artistic gesture and in the question we can/should repeat to ourselves with every medal: “But for me, those 100 metres freestyle, how many minutes – no? How many seconds – would it have taken me to swim them.”
From here, we set out to achieve other records: of the 2.8 million tickets available, two million have already been sold (and do Some sports such as fencing, taekwondo, cycling, horse riding, triathlon and shooting), and 200,000 will go to schools “because we need to involve new generations to change the perception of disability”, confirmed Tony Estanguet, president of the organizing committee. Paris 2024, since its candidacy, has done everything it could to create a version that mirrors the Games: same logo, same mascot, Paralympic athletes carrying the torch towards the Olympic bonfire: “We were so ambitious and so bold,” President Estanget proudly admits, “that we tried to create as broad a base as possible so that the educational programmes for five million students would be the real legacy of the event.” France has allocated $1.5 billion to inclusion projects, including so-called inclusive clubs to train teachers who know how to deal with students with disabilities; Paris, for its part, has done everything it can and invested heavily to make buses 100% accessible (it has not managed to do so in metro stations). Telecommunications will do the same: 165 television channels will broadcast the races around the world – another record – to an audience of 4.5 billion people. They will be able to watch the sport played in iconic venues, from the Grand Palais to the Eiffel Tower to the gardens of Versailles, which do not have much impact. Emotional. The President of the International Patent Committee, Andrew Parsons, concludes that “the ambition remains to be a beacon of hope for people with disabilities and, more generally, for the possibility of living in peace: we are all equal in humanity.” It is true that conflicts, even if they exist, deny everything.
This evening, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Champs-Élysées, Paris will embrace the Paralympic movement and the world: among the 168 delegations, 140 athletes from Ukraine will also show off, much more than just an act of courage and self-determination, before the gaze of dozens of heads of state from all over the world, including the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Because sport is much more political and social than you think. In the end, it is worth more than ever claim The USA team chose him for this Paralympic Games: “One for All.”
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