Paralympians are getting ready to shine in Paris.

Starting on Wednesday, the Paris Paralympics will showcase the abilities of exceptional athletes in a city still recovering from the enormously successful 2024 Summer Olympics.

Sophisticated veterans will compete with a new generation of Paralympians in many of the same spectacular facilities in the heart of the French capital that played host to Olympic sports.

From August 28 to September 8, 18 of the 35 Olympic sites will host the Paralympics, including the Grand Palais, which received high marks for housing the taekwondo and fencing competitions.

Both the Stade de France, which will hold track and field, and the La Defense Arena, which will stage the 141 gold-medal events in parasailing, are returning.

Place de la Concorde, the site of skateboarding and other urban sports during the Olympics, will host the opening ceremony. For the first time in a Paralympic games, the ceremony will take place outside of the main stadium, similar to the Olympic opening ceremony on the Seine River.

Less than half of the tickets were apparently sold by the time the Olympics got underway, but sales have picked up significantly since then, and organizers claim that some stadiums are sold out.

New stars are made in every game, and this one won’t be any different. One of the up-and-coming athletes is the 19-year-old American high jumper and sprinter Ezra Frech, who was amputed above the knee and has already garnered significant attention for his trip to Paris.

There will be well-known names to follow as well. Jonnie Peacock, a British amputee sprinter, was a prominent competitor in the 2012 London Paralympics. He retired from competition last year then returned to win a medal at the Paralympics for the fourth time.

But the Paralympics have always been about much more than just sports, and President of the International Paralympic Committee Andrew Parsons stated earlier this year that he hoped the Paris Games would bring issues affecting disabled people back to the top of the international agenda.

The Games, in Parsons’ opinion, “will have a big impact in how people with disability are perceived around the world.”

“This is one of the key expectations we have around Paris 2024; we believe that we need people with disability to be put back on the global agenda,” the Brazilian politician stated.

He maintained that in recent years, disability has lost ground to sexual orientation and gender identity.

“We do believe people with disability have been left behind,” he stated. “There is very little debate about persons with disability.”

China, a dominant force in the Paralympic Games, will field a formidable team; three years ago in Tokyo, they took home 96 gold medals. With 41, Britain came in second.

Riding high on the success of its Olympic squad, host nation France will be looking to improve significantly on the 11 gold medals it won in 2021.

Despite the difficulties it faces while the war against Russia rages, Ukraine, which has a reputation for being among the top medal-winning countries at the Paralympics, will send a squad of 140 participants across 17 disciplines.

Russian and Belarusian athletes will compete without team colors and under a neutral banner, although they are not allowed to participate in the opening or closing ceremonies.

Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both the Russian and Belarusian federations were suspended; however, their rivals are permitted to compete as neutrals as long as they haven’t expressed support for the conflict.

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