The Paralympic Torch

I'm going to be honest and admit that until this year, I didn't actually know that there was an event called the Paralympics that took place after the Olympic games.  It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like - disabled people from around the globe come to test themselves against one another to determine who the best in the world is, in the same proving grounds as regular Olympics.  Since I've come after all the Olympic jazz, I figured I'd missed all the cool stuff that was going to be happening because of it, but after last night I can definitely say I was wrong.

Steve was kind enough to agree to drive to Aylesbury with me to see the creation of the Paralympic flame.  We weren't able to actually get tickets to the stadium in Stoke Mandeville, but we were set up in the Market Square where they were broadcasting the event live and where the flame would later come to begin its 24 hour trek into London for the lighting ceremony tonight.

I hadn't realized the significance of the location, but the Paralympics actually first began in the Stoke Mandeville hospital in Aylesbury only fifty years ago, when it was thought that most people who had come back from World War II with serious disabilities wouldn't last longer than two years and should just be made comfortable to die.  A doctor named Ludwig Guttmann was responsible for changing this idea with one of his own - that using sports therapy could greatly improve the fitness and quality of life of his patients.  He hosted the first International Wheelchair Games in 1948 to coincide with the London Olympics, and the concept grew from there, expanding to include other types of physical disabilities as well as to be held, planned and executed by the same committee that hosts the Olympics.

This year's Paralympic games is apparently the biggest ever.  Nearly 4,000 athletes are competing and for the first time ever, the games are sold out, even the heats.  Steve's told me that they'll be broadcasting a lot of it on TV, and I had to wonder if they'd be broadcasting it in the US as well.  I don't know if I'm at fault for not knowing about the games, or if they aren't very well advertised back at home.

The actual event was pretty cool.  Steve and I armed ourselves with sandwiches and drinks and staked out a spot by the stage, where we watched the merging of four flames, which had been lit using traditional flint by scouts with and without disabilities who had climbed to the highest mountain in each of the four countries that make up the UK: Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England.  Together, they created the one flame (to rule them all!) that then made it way to the Stoke Mandeville hospital before heading toward the Market Square where we were.

I guess I should mention that there were other things before that, such as dance groups and singing by famous British people I'd never heard of, as well as a couple speeches.  While we were waiting, they did have some interesting street theatre that did neat musical sound effects (such as banging metal strainers together to make sword clashing noises) and harped on the British obsession with tea, which I thought was funny.  I was also quite keen on the performance that took place just before the flame arrived, which was an ecliptic mix of film, dance performance and artistry.  It was a old-fashioned hospital like setting, except the blank walls were canvases, which the artist started scribbling on, depicting movement.  They really did just mostly look like scribbles for most of the time, until the end where they actually did end up forming clearer images.  It was really cool to see the metamorphosis.  I wondered if she sold them after each show -- it's pretty awesome to see something like that created right in front of you, and to have a memory invoked as part of a piece as well.

It was fun to be part of the British crowd as well.  Everyone was kind of chatting with one another, groaning and complaining when they announced the flame was delayed, commenting on the announcers and so forth.  I had four bouncy kids that I let stand in front of me for a while who were adorable and bouncing, climbing up the fence until one of the grandmotherly types in front of us complained that they were jostling her too much. At that point we all looked around at each other and realized that we had no idea who the kids belonged to.  They were claimed not too long after, but I was amused mostly because this was the same woman who kept backing into me and whose British flag cape kept flapping up and hitting me until her husband noticed and tucked it around the side.  They were a funny pair, but I liked them very much, especially after she starting giving some of the guys in the press box a teasing hard time for being able just to pop in there and have a perfect view when she'd been standing there for six hours.  They took the ribbing well and asked her to get them some coffee.  The people around us also championed the cause of a mother with two kids, one in a wheelchair, to get them pushed up to the front, where the organizers finally noticed them and allowed them into the disabled section that they'd been rejected from before.  We cheered when they finally let them through.

Then the torch itself arrived!  We could see it held high above the heads of the crowd until they ran it up to the stage and performed a kiss, where the flame was passed to another torchbearer who would start it on its way out of Aylesbury to London.

I have to say that the send off was probably the best 3D video/pyrotechnics show I've ever seen.  Of course, I only remember some of the one I saw at Stone Mountain in Georgia when I was young (oddly enough, we were there during the Olympics then too), which is what my parents usually cite as the best one they've seen.  But this one was incredible.  They managed to perfectly outline the old style town hall-esq building just behind the stage and used the visual effects to make it shrink, spin, flip upside down, and to make people and giant arms come out of the windows.  And they had fireworks perfectly in tune with it, which were also amazing.  They had to have shot off thousands of them, and they were all fairly low and right above our heads, launched from the roof of the same building the video projection was on.  And with the crazy fireworks finale, they launched a bunch of red white and blue ticker-tape into the air, along with streamers.

It was an amazing show, and an amazing night.  And almost the best part happened at the end, as we were headed back out to the parking lot.  We passed by one of the torchbearers who still had her torch (apparently they all get to keep them as a souvenir -- how cool is that?) and she let me hold it and wave it in the air.  Awesome!