PARIS, Aug. 28 (by EUROPA PRESS special correspondent Ramón Chamorro) –
Paris offered a vindictive welcome on Wednesday to the Paralympic athletes who will compete from Thursday, August 29 to September 8 in the French capital, where the movement began its own revolution in an Opening Ceremony where concord, acceptance and inclusion were called for, and where the dreams of the 150 Spaniards who will participate were championed by Marta Arce and Álvaro Valera.
The visually impaired judoka from Valladolid, winner of three medals in four Games, and the table tennis player from Seville, holder of six medals between Sydney 2000 and Tokyo 2020, were in charge of leading the national delegation, which was not complete due to the need of some of its members to rest for their respective competitions.
Accompanied by better weather than at the opening of the Olympics, they all paraded down the imposing Champs-Élysées towards the Place de la Concorde, dressed in their original uniforms, polo shirts with the only work by the Malaga painter Pablo Picasso dedicated to sport on the front.
The parade ended at Place de la Concorde, a name around which the axis of this opening of the event revolved, in which its creators wanted to vindicate the existing paradox between a society that claims to be inclusive, but remains full of prejudices towards people with disabilities.
An invitation to reflect on the path forward, with two groups as its main protagonists, moving from discord to harmony: the Spanish name of this symbolic square and a reminder of what happened in the French Revolution, a new and dreamy “Revolution of Inclusion” as stressed by Tony Estanguet, president of Paris 2024, and Andrew Parsons, president of the CPI.
Through five artistic segments and featuring 140 artists, 16 of whom are disabled, the ceremony told the story of the ‘Strict Society’, resistant to change, and the ‘Creative Band’, representing people with disabilities who make up 15 percent of the world’s population.
They, the music of Edith Piaf in a version of her well-known ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ (‘No, I don’t regret anything’), a song to resilience and accepting oneself as one is, covered by ‘Christine and the Queens’, and the former French Paralympic swimmer Théo Curin, in charge, after getting out of his peculiar taxi covered in stuffed animals of ‘Phryges’, the mascot of Paris 2024, of welcoming Paris and the start of the party under the watchful eye of the Obelisk of the Place de la Concorde.
After the long break for the parade of the 168 delegations present at these Games, a record, and where the biggest ovations, apart from the host France, in charge of closing it, were for the Refugee Paralympic Team, which will have eight athletes in six sports (athletics, weightlifting, table tennis, taekwondo, triathlon and wheelchair fencing), Palestine and Ukraine, two countries that are going through a difficult war situation.
From there, the ceremony continued its journey towards an inclusive society, with a section that narrated the complex process of accepting a disability towards a new confidence in the body, and which gradually caused a change of mentality in the ‘Strict Society’ group.
Following the speeches and the official opening of the event by Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, the flag of the Paralympic Movement was brought in, carried by the British John McFall, Paralympic medallist and the first disabled astronaut to join the European Space Agency, followed by the Paralympic flame and the final arrival of harmony.
As in the past few weeks at the Olympic Games, the final leg of the torch relay and the lighting of the cauldron brought the event to a close. Olympic swimmer Laurent Manadou, Stephane Houdet, award-winning Paralympic athletes such as Oksana Masters and Markus Rehm, and legends of French Paralympic sport such as Assia El Hannouni were among the first final relay participants.
Triathlete Alexis Hanquinquant and athlete Nantenin Keïta were the penultimate finishers waiting at the foot of the venue for Charles-Antoine Kouakou, swimmer Elodie Lorandi and table tennis player Fabien Lamirault. Three men and two women formed a group that, for the organisers, represents the sporting level and diversity of disabilities and that marked the always emotional moment of the Opening Ceremony with midnight already approaching in a Paris that from this Thursday will be the epicentre of sport for people with disabilities.