I thoroughly enjoyed the Beijing olympics this year, I thought it was an amazing showcase of worldwide talent and really made me feel that we are all part of one world. Aside from a couple of incidents and controversies (how exactly did Beth Tweddle not win a medal?), it was an astounding event that was something everyone could be proud of. And of course, the main talking point was the ceremonies, the lavish, colourful and regimented displays of culture and personality that China put on. Who, we asked ourselves, could possibly top that? Well today we found out, the IPC can put on a fine show in collaboration with the Chinese...a massive statement to the olympians from the paralympians that anything you can do, we can certainly do better.

While the event is shorter on the whole, probably due to less competitors in less sports, this even is important to the equality movement world wide. Some have questioned, angrily, why it is paralympians don't compete alongside more able bodied competitors...obviously not in the same events but at least in the same schedule. I feel those people are ignoring any potential difficulty of two separate organising bodies working together on such a huge and costly event, though I don't know how well the IPC and IOC would work together. More importantly I think that far from having separate events giving the paralympics the feel of a sideshow, keeping it separate gives disabled athletes a true stage to make the statement about how good they are without any kind of overshadowing being able to occur.

This doesn't mean there aren't problems, in some countries this even is advertised as much (if not more) than the olympics...yet here, in a country where we are one of the top performing nation's, it is marketed like an afterthought by the BBC, an organisation I have previously defended because of its ability to promote just this sort of thing better than more commercial operations.

But now is the time to sit back and enjoy, and support, the paralympic games...and, quite aside from the rest of the opening ceremony, the image of a man in a wheelchair hoisting himself up to the stadium torch atop the roof using only a rope and pully system has been the most powerful statement of both games' opening ceremonies; in my mind putting it ahead of the ceremony a month ago that we thought couldn't be topped.