The 2024 Paris Summer Olympics concluded over two weeks ago, with Hungary finishing 14th in the medal table with six golds, seven silvers, and six bronzes. Now, however, another 39 Hungarian athletes are taking to Paris, France in pursuit of Olympic medals.
The 17th Summer Paralympic Games start today,
with 549 events in 22 sports on the schedule. Over 4,000 athletes are competing for medals from 169 different nations.
At the previous Paralympic games, Hungary performed outstandingly well, outdoing all the expectations. After the two gold medals won in London in 2012 and the one gold won in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, our para-athletes came back home with seven gold medals (!) from Tokyo, Japan three years ago. They also collected a total of five silver and four bronze medals. This got them 18th place on the medal table.
This is still far from Hungary’s best-ever performance at the Paralympics, which came in 1984 in New York City, New York in the United States (the Summer Olympics were held in the same country, but in a different city, Los Angeles, California then). There, Hungarian para-athletes won as many as 12 gold medals, along with 13 silvers and three bronzes.
Luca Ekler, a paralympic long jumper, is one of Tokyo’s champions who is returning to the arena this year. She broke her own world record in Japan three years ago, jumping 5.63 metres (18 feet 5 inches). She suffered a stroke in 2009 at age 11, which left the left side of her body paralysed. It took years of intense physical therapy to be able to properly use her body again, although her left hand remains affected. Her two brothers are professional water polo players.
Péter Pálos won his first place in table tennis in Tokyo, and he too is in the Hungarian delegation to Paris. He is not physically, but intellectually challenged. This is the fourth Paralympic Games he managed to qualify for. He won a gold medal in 2012 in London, then a bronze medal in 2016 in Rio, before collecting his aforementioned second gold in Tokyo.
The initial fears of lack of interest about the Paralympic Games have been somewhat put to rest. The British newspaper The Guardian reports that over 2 million tickets out of the 2.5 million on sale total have been sold to the events.
The opening ceremony went down without any controversy, unlike the opening of the Summer Olympic Games, which featured a scene that many took as a parody of the famous Leonardo Da Vinci painting The Last Supper. The official ratings are not out yet, but the organizers are on the record stating that they are expecting 300 million viewers worldwide for the opening ceremony, an ambitious number.
The 17th Summer Paralympic Games will be taking place from 28 August to 8 September 2024 in Paris, France.
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