Athens - With barely enough time to catch its breath after the summer Olympics, Athens is ready to host yet another mega sporting event. The 12th Paralympics, the largest gathering of disabled elite athletes in history, starts on Friday.
More than 4 000 athletes from 142 nations have assembled here to compete - against each other, to be sure, but also against the arbitrary limits imposed by illness or accident, and against the lingering prejudices of a world in which the disabled have only recently begun to find their rightful place.
In absolute terms, it is the second-biggest international sports competition after the summer Games, covering 19 disciplines, including athletics and swimming and running over 12 days.
Compared to previous Paralympics, it has attracted more athletes from more countries than ever before.
As organisers and athletes make clear, the Paralympics is not a "feel-good" event or an exercise in public education. It is all about winning and many of the athletes vying for medals perform at levels approaching national, and even international, levels in able-bodied competition.
While most top able-bodied athletes have turned professional, Paralympic athletes remain closer to the amateur spirit that once animated the Olympic Games.
And even if the concept of a special Games for the disabled would have seemed strange in ancient Greece, the Paralympics more closely resemble its early precursor than the modern able-bodied Olympics in at least one respect: only events with objective measures of speed, strength and distance are included.
Cheating
Another less fortunate indicator of the seriousness of competition at the Paralympics, alas, is the presence of performance-enhancing drugs and cheating. Eleven athletes - mostly weight-lifters - were disqualified from the Paralympics in 2000, more even than in the able-bodied Sydney Games that year.
And the Spanish basketball team competing in the category for the intellectually disabled in Sydney was stripped of its gold medal when it was revealed that most players had faked their disabilities.
The five disability groups in which medals are awarded, each of them with sub-divisions based on severity, are amputees, athletes with cerebral palsy, the vision impaired, athletes with spinal injuries, and les autres, a French term meaning "the others" covering persons with a range of conditions that do not fit into any other category.
These fine distinctions in disability result in a plethora of medals, more than 3 000 all told. One thousand-and-ninety-seven gold medals alone will be awarded over the 12 days of competition.
Besides athletics and swimming, the other sports at the Paralympics are archery, wheelchair basketball, cycling, equestrian, wheelchair fencing, five-a-side and seven-a-side football, goalball, judo, powerlifting, sailing, shooting, table tennis, wheelchair tennis, volley-ball, wheelchair rugby and boccia.
