Virtually two weeks after the Paris Olympics got here to an finish, the highlight is now on the Paralympic Video games.
British athletes Helene Raynsford and Gregor Ewan lit the Paralympic Flame in Stoke Mandeville, a village north-west of London extensively thought-about the birthplace of the Video games.
The Paralympic Flame will journey to France underneath the English Channel for a four-day relay.
Its journey will finish in Paris on Thursday morning, Australian time, throughout the Paralympics opening ceremony.
The lighting ceremony of the Paralympic Heritage Flame was held in Buckinghamshire, the place the Stoke Mandeville Video games have been first held in 1948.
The competitors was staged for a small group of wheelchair athletes who had sustained spinal accidents throughout World Battle II.
The individual behind the concept was Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish neurosurgeon who fled Germany and labored at a Stoke Mandeville hospital.
On the time, struggling a spinal harm was thought-about a loss of life sentence, and sufferers have been discouraged from shifting.
Guttmann made the sufferers sit up and work muscle mass and come across competitors as a strategy to maintain them motivated.
Andrew Parsons (left) and Tony Estanguet throughout the Paralympic Flame lighting ceremony. (AP: Thomas Krych)
“I can really feel his [Guttmann] presence right here right now, little doubt about it,” stated Worldwide Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons throughout the lighting ceremony.
Paris 2024 organising committee president Tony Estanguet stated the French capital was “proud and excited” to host the seventeenth version of the Paralympics.
“We’re able to make it distinctive and memorable for France and the entire world,” Estanguet stated.
The Stoke Mandeville Video games later grew into the primary Paralympic Video games, which occurred in Rome in 1960.
The Heritage Flame ceremony in Stoke Mandeville was first held forward of the London Paralympics in 2012.
The Flame will cross the ocean through the Channel Tunnel to mark the beginning of the Paralympic relay.
A gaggle of 24 British athletes will embark on the underwater journey by means of the tunnel.
Halfway by means of, they may hand over the flame to 24 French athletes who will deliver it ashore in Calais.
Will probably be used to gentle 12 torches, symbolising 11 days of competitors and the opening ceremony.
AP
