What are the Paralympic Video games?
Eleven days of elite competitors throughout 22 sports activities. With no fewer than 549 medals at stake, 4,400 athletes can be collaborating from 128 totally different nations, every of them with a bodily or cognitive incapacity.
When does it begin?
The opening ceremony for the seventeenth summer time Paralympic Video games will happen in Paris on Wednesday 28 August from 7pm UK time. As with the Olympics this summer time, the ceremony can be staged not in a stadium however within the metropolis, with the placement shifting from the River Seine to the Champs Élysées. A “individuals’s parade” can be accessible to most people earlier than arriving on the Place de la Concorde, previously the positioning of the Olympic “parc urbain”, which is able to then stage the climactic portion of the night and the lighting of the Paralympic torch. The sporting motion begins the following day.
The place will the game be performed?
Various the venues you fell in love with earlier in the summertime are set to return, with 18 of the 35 Olympic places being repurposed for the Paralympics. The Stade de France and La Défense Enviornment will as soon as once more host athletics and swimming, respectively, and biking will return to the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome. The sand has been faraway from the Eiffel Tower stadium in order that blind soccer can exchange seashore volleyball. The one occasion to be held outdoors the French capital would be the para-shooting in Châteauroux.
What time will the motion be on?
You’ve most likely already adjusted your physique clock to the challenges of consuming sport from the French capital and for these within the UK it’s not very exhausting (it’s an hour forward). The game will start at 8.30am within the morning native time and finish at 10.30pm.
What are the important thing occasions?
Very similar to the Olympics, the centrepiece of the Paralympic Video games is the observe and area programme. The competitors begins on Friday 30 August, runs for 9 days and produces medals daily. Each Saturdays are significantly stuffed, with 7 September boasting no fewer than 22 finals over its two periods. Different marquee occasions to look out for would be the wheelchair rugby remaining on Monday 2 September and finals day within the para-rowing at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium on Sunday 1 September.
Which British stars ought to we glance out for?
Of the 215 athletes that type the ParalympicsGB staff this 12 months there are 81 debutants, which means an amazing likelihood for brand spanking new heroes to be made. Amongst these recent names, look out for 19-year-old bicycle owner Archie Atkinson (racing within the C4 pursuit), the 13-year-old swimming prodigy Iona Winnifrith (going within the SB7 100m breaststroke and SM7 particular person medley) and Rachel Choong, world champion in para-badminton who’s making her debut on the Video games after her classification was lastly included in competitors.
What’s a ‘classification’?
One important function of incapacity sport is that athletes are chosen for competitors primarily based on the character and severity of their incapacity. In an effort to guarantee honest competitors, all athletes should undergo the classification course of the place they’re assessed by technical and medical specialists to make sure they’re chosen in an applicable class. This is likely one of the the reason why there are such a lot of medals; there are dozens of various classifications, particularly in observe and area.
Classification may be the reason for big disappointment, with athletes typically being excluded from competitors as a result of their impairment isn’t judged to be nice sufficient. It is usually a political subject, with a debate over whether or not there needs to be extra classifications to be able to permit extra inclusion, or fewer to boost competitiveness.
How can I watch the Video games?
There are nonetheless as many as 500,000 tickets out there for the Video games, with specific availability in observe and area on the 80,000 capability Stade de France. There are additionally additional tickets anticipated to be made out there at a number of the sold-out sports activities: wheelchair fencing, para-taekwondo, para-cycling, para-equestrian, triathlon, para-shooting and blind soccer.
Within the UK, Channel 4 is promising its most intensive protection but, with over 1,300 hours of dwell broadcasting and as much as 18 concurrent dwell streams operating on its YouTube channel. It’s going to even be its most inclusive thus far; with subtitles for each broadcast and closed audio description on Channel 4 at primetime, whereas dwell sport on More4 and Channel 4 Streaming on weekday afternoons will embrace British signal language dwell signing. The BBC, in the meantime, can be offering radio protection.
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