Stadiums packed with fans will be welcome sight for 2024 Paralympic athletes
CBC
The party starts with the opening ceremony at the Champs-Élysées one year from today.
Josh Vander Vies, a 2012 boccia bronze medallist and co-chef de mission of Team Canada in Paris, remembers that moment from his three Paralympics vividly.
"You're in the tunnel getting closer and closer, and then you hear the loudness and then you cross the threshold and it's 80,000 people cheering. And then they announce Canada and everybody cheers a little bit louder. That's what we can't wait for."
The 2024 Paris Paralympics have been coined "The Celebration Games" — a return to order, and perhaps even the establishment of a new normal, for an event stunted by the pandemic at Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022.
Karolina Wisniewska, an eight-time Paralympic medallist who shares the role with Vander Vies, said she's already feeling that excitement.
"What we're seeing and what we're sensing out there is that the Paris Games may well be on the level or surpassing London 2012, which in Paralympic parlance were the greatest summer Paralympic Games up to that point," Wisniewska said.
Stadiums packed with fans will be a welcome sight for athletes, who mostly missed out on that experience in Tokyo.
WATCH | Rob Pizzo speaks with IPC president Andrew Parsons:
Keely Shaw, a Para cyclist from Midale, Sask., won bronze on the track in an empty stadium in Tokyo but also competed in road races where people lined the sidewalks.
"It was pouring, it was a monsoon, and it was all kinds of awful. But there were locals out there with cow bells and horns and signs, and they're cheering for you whether you're in first-place position or whether you're last getting lapped by the group."
Shaw, 29, recently experienced that feeling inside the velodrome at the world championships in Scotland and said it was "wild."
"It was electric and it's pretty incredible to see. Don't get me wrong, that can be a little bit nerve wracking, but when I'm on the track, I don't hear the sounds. I don't see the fans. It's me and the coach and I'm pretty dialed," she said.
Not only were fans not allowed in stadiums in Tokyo or Beijing — neither were families.
Nate Riech, 28, said it was "awesome" to embrace Carla Nicholls, Canada's Paralympic high-performance lead, and coach Heather Henninger after winning gold in the 1,500 metres in Tokyo.
