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Next up Sydney prepares for the 'Parallel Olympics'
By Luba Vangelova, Special to CNNSI.com Sydney is a city divided. On the one hand, most of the populace is wallowing in a post-Olympics funk, waxing nostalgic for those exhaustingly giddy weeks in September when the city was full of smiling, friendly faces and general bonhomie. Meanwhile, a small army of workers is busily preparing Olympic Park for another big event that begins on October 18th and promises a reprise of festive spirits. The Paralympics, or "parallel Olympics," will be the second-largest sporting event ever staged in Sydney. Though they are eclipsed in this and other ways by the Games that just ended, the Paralympics movement -- whose mission is to allow physically and intellectually handicapped athletes to compete on an equal basis -- has grown steadily since its 1960 debut. That year, the Rome Paralympics drew 400 athletes from 23 countries. At the Sydney Paralympics (Oct. 18-29), about 4,000 athletes from 128 nations will participate in 18 sports. They will compete in one of six disability categories: amputee; cerebral palsy; intellectual disability; vision impaired; wheelchair; and "les autres" (literally, "the others," this includes athletes with dwarfism and other conditions that impair mobility). Each category is further subdivided according to degree of disability. The Paralympics period officially began on Thursday, when the torch began snaking its way from Canberra to Sydney on its two-week relay route. The national Paralympic teams are still training at camps around Australia; they will begin to move into the athletes' village when it reopens on Oct. 11. The Sydney Paralympic Organizing Committee (SPOC) is responsible for, among other things, readying the village and venues in the two-and-a-half week Games interim period. The committee did itself a favor by planning ahead, ensuring that Olympic venues to be re-used for the Paralympics were designed to be handicapped-accessible from the start. One of SPOC's major tasks, therefore, is to simply change the look of the venues, replacing the Olympic rings with the Paralympic logo. In the few cases in which a venue will be used for different sports -- one Dome pavilion used for Olympic badminton will host Paralympic fencing and sitting volleyball - SPOC is replacing the playing fields and rearranging the seating. It is also completely revamping the Olympics merchandise store and main press conference facility, transforming them into boccia and powerlifting venues, respectively. In the case of venues such as the SuperDome, which will again host basketball, the number of media seats are being reduced to reflect the lesser media presence and to accomodate additional spectators. Extra ramps and additional bathroom equipment are also being added to various venues, to account for the unusually large number of handicapped athletes and spectators at the Paralympics. The athletes' village was designed to accomodate both Olympians and Paralympians; the houses already have ramps and accessible bathrooms. SPOC is merely scaling the village down for the smaller Paralympics contingents and making some last-minute modifications that include building a few extra ramps and adding services such as orthotics- and wheelchair-repair stations. Xavier Gonzalez, SPOC's general manager for sport and
games operations, says the transition work is
proceeding apace. "We started with a good foundation,"
he says. "I don't foresee any problems."
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