2012 PARALYMPIC GAMES OPENS
By Maloney L. Samaco
PhilBoxing.com
Thu, 30 Aug 2012
The London 2012 Paralympics opened August 29 and will end up on September 9, and is the biggest in the Games? 52-year history. A record 2.5 million tickets have been sold, the first-ever Paralympic sell-out. There are 4,200 athletes competing in 503 medal events, an increase from 3,951 competitors in Beijing in 2008.
Twenty Paralympic sports will be played, including athletics, swimming, cycling, wheelchair rugby, and goalball, in which visually-impaired athletes play with a ball embedded with a bell. There are 15 men?s 100 meter finals that will be contested under the complex Paralympic classification system, to ensure fair competition in competing athletes of similar levels of impairment against each other.
There are 166 competing countries sending athletes. Some 16 nations will be making their Paralympic debut, including North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Games will include 15 competition venues, including the Olympic Stadium, velodrome, aquatics centre and Eton Manor, a permanent new complex of nine wheelchair tennis courts inside the Olympic Park.
The Paralympics will have 1,250 anti-doping samples, a 25 percent increase since Beijing. A workshop with 15,000 spare parts will be on standby to repair athletes? wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs and orthoses, devices which support the limbs.
Some 580 torchbearers carried the Paralympic flame in a 24-hour relay from Stoke Mandeville, the birthplace of the Paralympic movement, in southern England to London?s Olympic Stadium.
The Paralympic Games is the world's second largest major international multi-sport event, involving athletes with a range of physical disabilities, including mobility disabilities, amputations, blindness, and cerebral palsy. There are Winter and Summer Paralympic Games, and since the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea, are held immediately following the respective Olympic Games.
The present formal justification for the name "Paralympic" is that it is a competition held in parallel with the Olympic Games. The Summer Games of 1988 held in Seoul was the first time the term "Paralympic" came into official use.
Nine of the country?s top athletes with disabilities represent the Philippines in the 2012 Paralympics. They will be competing in four events: athletics, swimming, powerlifting and table tennis.
Isidro Vildosola (1500-meter run), Roger Tapia (200-meter run), Andy Avellana (high jump) and Marites Burce (javelin throw) will compete in athletics. Adeline Ancheta (85 kg division), Achelle Guion (48 kg division) and Agustin Kitan (52 kg division) will compete in powerlifting. Josephine Medina will play in the table tennis while Beariza Ma. Roble will participate in swimming. This year?s delegation is the biggest the Philippines has sent since the country's first team joined in 2000.
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