Seventeen days after the Olympic closing ceremony, on August 29, 2012, another vast international sports festival will spark into life in the Olympic venues. It will feature 20 sports and 4,200 athletes. This will be the 2012 Paralympic Summer Games.
As a movement whose origins can be traced back to a post-second world war sports competition for soldiers with spinal cord injuries based at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, this will be a homecoming of sorts for the Paralympics.
