AREQUIPA, Peru – From August 28 to September 8, Paris, France, will host the Paralympic Games, an event that aims to set several records in terms of participation.
According to data from the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), cited by the medium HitAthletes from 168 delegations will compete: 167 national Paralympic committees and a neutral team made up of eight refugee athletes and 98 athletes from Russia and Belarus, the latter of whom are unable to participate representing their countries.
This figure exceeds the 164 who attended the London 2012 and Tokyo 2020 editions. Similarly, the number of athletes is expected to exceed the 4,393 who attended the Japanese event.
It has also emerged that three new national Paralympic committees will join the party in Paris: Eritrea, Kiribati and Kosovo.
In terms of representation, women will break new records for participation, continuing with the competitive analogy, as they qualified 1,983, which dethrones the previous edition of These games as the largest number of females, with 1,846.
In terms of prominence, it will also set a trend, as there will be more medal events for women: the 235 events exceed by eight those held in the Land of the Rising Sun.
IPC President Andrew Parsons said: “The IPC is constantly striving to work with our members to advance the Paralympic movement, so achieving a record number of competing delegations and female athletes for the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games is fantastic news.”
In terms of representativeness, China leads the list of nations with the most participants, followed by Brazil, France, the United States and Great Britain.
The history of the Paralympics dates back to 1948. That year, German neurologist Ludwig Guttmann organised a series of sporting competitions for war veterans who were paraplegic or wheelchair-bound, at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in north-west London.
The event was organized to coincide with the Olympics from London in 1948, the first after World War II.
The Paralympic movement was born from this initiative. The first Paralympic Games as such were organised in Rome in 1960, with 400 athletes from 23 countries.
