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London marks two years to Paralympics
London will mark the two-year countdown to the homecoming of the Paralympics on Sunday, celebrating the growing prominence of disabled sportsmen while recognizing the modest English origins of the pioneering event.
More than 500 000 people have already registered an interest in buying tickets for the 12-day event, and London 2012 organisers hope to attract a global TV audience of four billion.
Despite much of the action taking place in new venues built for the Olympics, it will be a Paralympics drawing heavily on the symbolism of returning to the country of conception.
The official mascot Mandeville is a nod to the location of the first games, which coincided with the 1948 London Olympics. They featured just 16 patients - British soldiers paralyzed in World War II - who were recovering at Stoke Mandeville hospital near London and were advised to engage in sport as part of pioneering treatment.
From such low-key beginnings, London 2012 organisers are hoping the August 29-September 9 Paralympics will bring in the most lucrative TV deals seen yet for the event, having already secured unprecedented coverage on Britain's Channel 4.
"We're breaking new ground with the revenue that we're bringing in," said London 2012 director of Paralympic integration Chris Holmes - a former Paralympic swimming champion. "And Mandeville will be an incredibly important piece of how we connect and engage with the public. It's really fantastic that we've got that history in Stoke Mandeville and it's coming home in 2012 with a modern international festival of Paralympic sport."
The 1948 games were not just the starting gun for a sporting revolution, but to technological improvements that changed the lives of disabled people and led to their growing acceptance in society.
"If you look back to the early years, the view of disability was inherently negative," 11-time British Paralympic champion Tanni Grey-Thompson said. "Now the Paralympics have been raised to a whole new level in terms of sponsors and highlighting what the disabled can achieve."
Grey-Thompson, Britain's most successful disabled athlete, highlights the rapid advances in treatment since 1948.
"Until that point if you had a spinal cord injury you were left in hospital to die and life expectancy was seven years," she said.
"Now if you have a spinal cord injury you are likely to live as long as anyone else.
"Sport has helped drive medical changes and that medical technology has helped change sport."
Medical technology such as the prosthetic limbs used by South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius - the "Blade Runner", who is hoping to be the first track and field athlete to compete in both the Paralympic and Olympic Games. Pistorius's compatriot Natalie du Toit has already achieved that in the pool at Beijing 2008.
In Beijing, Britain was second only to China in the Paralympic medal table, winning 42 gold and 102 medals.
And British hopes in London will be led by 15-year-old swimmer
Eleanor Simmonds, who this month won four world championship gold
medals.
