Just days after the commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation from German occupation during World War II, Paris city centre will be the stage for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paralympic Games.
Around 6,000 competitors and officials will parade around the Champs Elysées and the Place de la Concorde on 28 August during a three-hour sound and light spectacular.
And why not? The River Seine beat at the heart of the launch show for the Olympics on 26 July.
Nigh on a month later, two of the most quintessentially Parisian landmarks will provide the backdrop for the start of the Paralympic fest.
"It will be a spectacle that will showcase the Paralympic athletes and the values that they embody," said Thomas Jolly, the ceremony’s artistic director.
Jolly, whose Olympic opening ceremony was widely praised, added: "The event will unite spectators and television audiences worldwide around the unique spirit of the Paralympic Games."
That the Paralympics’ begin so soon after such a significant moment in World War II history, adds poignancy to the event – the Games' origins lie in the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers from that conflict.
Veterans' sports day
On 29 July 1948 at the National Spinal Injuries Centre in Stoke Mandeville, patients – many of whom were war veterans – participated in a sports day while the opening ceremony for the London Olympics was taking place at Wembley Stadium in north-west London.
Though the spotlight was very much on proceedings in the capital, the idea of competitive sports contests was well received. The concept gradually gained traction under the centre's charismatic director Ludwig Guttmann.
Before fleeing his native Germany in 1939 with his family to avoid the rising anti-semitism, Guttmann studied under the pioneering neurosurgeon Otfrid Foerster.
While Foerster excelled in brilliant surgical techniques such as cutting problematic nerve roots in the spinal cord for the treatment of spasticity, Guttmann injected a mental component into his care for people with spinal injuries.
He advocated sport as a way to reinstall a sense of self-worth and physical well being.
Held every summer in the verdant grounds of the hospital after that 1948 launch, the Stoke Games were rechristened the International Stoke Mandeville Games (ISMG) in 1952 when a team from the Netherlands competed.
In 1955, France's first sports association for physically handicapped people, the Amicale Sportive des Mutilés de France, sent representatives to the fourth ISMG.
Milestone
In 1960, the ISMG celebrated two firsts. They were held away from the hospital and in the same city as the Olympic Games.
In what was retrospectively anointed the first Paralympic Games, 400 competitors from 23 countries took part in 57 events in eight sports between 18 and 25 September at the Aqua Acetosa Stadium.
At the closing ceremony, Guttmann, as patron of the Games, said: “The vast majority of competitors and escorts have fully understood the meaning of the Rome Games as a new pattern of reintegration of the paralysed into society, as well as the world of spoart.”
Nearly 64 years later, athletes from 170 nations will compete in 549 events across 22 sports.
The 2024 Games will feature para badminton and para taekwondo, which made their debut in Tokyo three years ago. They will unfold at the Porte de la Chapelle Arena and the Grand Palais respectively – the same venues used for the sports during the Olympics.
There will be para archery, para athletics, para cycling, para swimming, wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis and sitting volleyball.
With the inclusion of athletes with intellectual or visual impairments, shorter limbs and amputees, Paris 2024 will be a far cry from Guttmann's original sports day when all participants had spinal cord injuries and competed in wheelchairs.
Changing perceptions
"The Paralympic movement is changing not only the way we look at disability but also the way we think about it, with classifications based on functional capabilities," said Anne Marcellini, associate professor at the University of Lausanne, who co-curated an exhibition on the paralympic movement at the Pantheon in Paris.
"The idea of the exhibition was to showcase the sports leaders who have shaped the movement and made a strong social commitment. The repercussions of this have been felt way beyond the competitive sporting arena."
But that change has taken years to install.
After taking place in the same city as the Olympics in Rome in 1960 and Tokyo in 1964, the Paralympics were subsequently shunted to separate cities.
Instead of Mexico City in 1968, the Paralympics was held in Tel Aviv. The summer Olympics was held in 1972 in Munich – the Paralympics in Heidelberg.
Montreal was awarded the summer Games in 1976 and Toronto the Paralympics. The apartness only ceased in 1988 when Seoul hosted both. And the habit has continued as the Paralympic Games have grown to become the planet's third biggest sporting show behind the Olympics and the football World Cup.
Expect surprises
"The Paralympics is the only global event where persons with disability are front and centre of everything," said Andrew Parsons, boss of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) which was set up in 1989 with the aim of using para sport as a way to advance the lives of the 1.2 billion people with disabilities
"Paralympic athletes will surprise you," Parsons added. "They will defy what you thought was possible. They will challenge what you thought was possible.
"There will be 12 days of top class sport that will change France forever. It will change how people think about themselves and it will change how people think about people with disability in general."
A breakdown of ticket sales a week before the start of the Paralympic Games confirms his assertions.
The data showed nearly 75 percent of the 1.75 million seats sold were to fans from the Ile de France – the 12,000 square kilometre area housing more than 12 million people aorund Paris.
IPC chiefs say they are confident they will reach a cumulative TV audience of more than 4.25 billion viewers – up on the record set at Tokyo 2020 of 4.1 billion.
Local and vocal
Parsons also stressed the impact of local support on the performance of athletes.
"Like with the Olympics, I believe vocal French support can propel French Paralympians to sporting success," he said.
Recalling his experience at the Rio 2016 Paralympics while hewas head of the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, he added: "I lost count of the unexpected medals won by the Brazilian team because they found that extra strength, speed, and skill from the energy of the home crowd.
"It's perhaps the 10th of a second that makes the difference between silver and gold."
How the public – and in particular during the Paralympics – those with disabilities reach the venue will come under the spotlight.
Organisers estimate 350,000 people with disabilities will converge on Paris during the Paralympic Games.
Paris accessibility
They will find only 29 of Paris’s 320 metro stations are fully or partially accessible to wheelchair users.
Ile de France Mobilités, which oversees public transport in Paris, has acknowledged the deficiencies in its system but says it is committed to providing accessible routes on other forms of transport and promoting smartphone apps such as EZYMOB to help navigate the city.
Nicolas Mérille, an accessibility adviser at APF France Handicap, told France 24 he hopes the Games will be a catalyst for change.
"We've got to hope that the Paralympic Games is a wake-up call and raises awareness to show that accessibility is just segregation by another name," he said.
In tandem with the country's social goals, French participants have been set competitive targets of claiming 20 gold medals and finishing eighth in the medals table.
"For the first time in its history, France will be present in all of the sports on the Paralympic programme," said Marie-Amélie Le Fur, head of France's paralympics committee.
"We've seen what the Olympians achieved, and now it's the turn of the Paralympians."
