A new generation of Paralympians will join the experienced veterans competing in many of the same Olympic sports venues.

A total of 18 of the 35 Olympic venues will be used for the Paralympics, which run until September 8, including the Grand Palais, which received rave reviews for hosting the fencing and taekwondo competitions under an ornate roof.

The Arena La Défense is also back and will host the 141 Para-swimming competitions, where gold medals will be awarded. The same goes for the Stade de France, where the athletics will once again be held.

The Games will open with a ceremony on the Place de la Concorde, the square in central Paris where skateboarding and other “urban” sports were held during the Olympic Games.

Like the Olympic ceremony on the Seine, the ceremony at the Paralympics will take place outside the main stadium for the first time.

The Paralympic flame was lit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England, the birthplace of the Games, and transported to France through the Channel Tunnel.

Theater director Thomas Jolly, who also directed the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, said that moving the Paralympics ceremony to the center of the French capital had deep symbolism, even though the city’s subway system in particular was not at all adapted to the needs of wheelchair users.

“Bringing the Paralympic athletes to the city centre is a political signal in the sense that the city is not sufficiently adapted to all disabled people,” said Jolly.

Organizers say that Paris buses, on the other hand, are wheelchair accessible and that they have also provided 1,000 specially adapted taxis.

Sluggish ticket sales have picked up since the Olympics, and organizers say more than 1.9 million tickets have now been sold.

New stars, familiar faces

All Games bring new stars and this edition is no exception, so look out for American sprinter and high jumper Ezra Frech, who is missing a transfemoral limb and who, at 19, has already attracted a lot of attention in his trip to Paris.

And more familiar names are returning too: British sprinter Jonnie Peacock, who suffered an amputation, was one of the most famous athletes of the London 2012 Games and last year pulled out his running shoes to launch a comeback and win a medal at the Paralympics for the fourth year in a row.

Off the track, the 2.46 meter tall Iranian sitting volleyball legend Morteza Mehrzad will once again try to win gold.

Iranian athlete Morteza Mehrzad attends a training session of the Iranian national sitting volleyball team in Tehran on July 20, 2024, ahead of the Paris 2024 Paralympics. Iranian sitting volleyball star Morteza Mehrzad has overcome countless challenges due to his towering height, but now he is ready to help his team to another victory at the Paris Paralympics. (AFP/Atta Kenare)

But the message of the Paralympics always goes beyond sport. Andrew Parsons, president of the International Paralympic Committee, told AFP earlier this year that he hoped the Paris Games would put the issues facing disabled people back at the top of the list of global priorities.

Parsons believes the Games will have a “huge impact on how people with disabilities are perceived around the world.”

“This is one of our main expectations for Paris 2024. We believe that people with disabilities must be put back on the global agenda,” said the Brazilian.

He argued that in recent years disability has fallen behind sexual and gender identity.

“We believe that people with disabilities have been left behind. There is very little debate about people with disabilities.”

Top Paralympic team China will send a strong team. The Chinese dominated the medal table at the COVID-19-postponed Tokyo Games three years ago, winning 96 gold medals. Great Britain came second with 41 gold medals.

Host France is riding the wave of success of its Olympic team and is aiming for a significant improvement on the eleven gold medals it won in 2021.

Ukraine, traditionally one of the most medal-winning nations at the Paralympics, will send a team of 140 athletes from 17 sports despite the difficult preparations associated with the war against Russian forces.

The 96 athletes from Russia and Belarus compete under a neutral banner, but are excluded from the opening and closing ceremonies.

Both the Russian and Belarusian associations were suspended following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but their participants are allowed to compete as neutral associations provided they have not shown support for the war.