The 2008 Paralympics
 

Great start from Aus, ahead on the US system :cool:

Inadequate TV coverage here. Sucks, really enjoy some of the events. Wheelchair rugby is brutal.

Just saw the NZ Paralympic team doing a haka. ****ing hell.

ABC2 doing a good coverage here, 7 hours a day i think...now if only i had a digital set top box so i could watch it.

Remember a bloke I used to train with got silver in Atlanta, he was a bit of a celeb for a while

Would like to see more of it.. SA have an absolutely outstanding bunch of prospects in this form who were urged to restore a bit of pride to our athletics.. Oscar Pistorius and Natalie du Toit ones to look out for..

I hear New Zealand's won a gold already (cycling apparently). Good stuff. :)

Kurt Fearnley (Bloke ABC talked to during the opening cermony) is one of my mates actually. Should go gun in the events he's in (T54 class i think) 100 m, 4x100m, 400m, 4x400m and marathon. (might be one or two more in there)

Yeah...thats my brush with semi-celebrity

I'm really enjoying ABC2's coverage so far. Ch7 should learn a bit.
Peter Walsh, Steve Robilliard [sp] and Gerry Collins are terrific commentators.

Just watched the Aussie womens basketball team beat Brazil 66-30. Now watching the tandem cycling, great stuff.

Rinette van Rensburg
The South African Paralympic team is showing they have what it takes to win medals and that on their first day of competing. Paralympian swimmer Natalie du Toit opened South Africa's medal tally with not only a gold medal but also a new world record. Du Toit bettered her own world record in the 100m butterfly earlier today. The Games officially opened yesterday.

Du Toit finished in a time of 1 minute, 6.74 seconds. She bettered her own world record with five hundredths of a second. The Australians Williams and Ellie Cole won the silver and bronze medals respectively.

The gold medal and new world record will help Du Toit forget a disappointing Beijing Olympics. Du Toit was the first disabled athlete to compete in an able bodied event that debued at this year's game - the 10km open water swim. She is determined to bring home five gold medals.

Yeah, so New Zealand have already won a gold medal. Do we get any sort of report about it on the news? Nope, just a couple of sentences at the end and no video or pictures. Useless pricks.

Apologies if we had only just won it and there wasn't enough time for a proper report.

Not sure you can justify that.. There are loads of challenging, worthwhile sports that never get any airtime on the news, in any country, succesful or not..

We won a gold medal, there should have been more than two sentences dedicated to it. Should have taken priority over Formula 1 and the US Tennis Open IMO.

You're ****ing joking aren't you? Look, fair play to any athletes with a disability (I better use the PC term) who have made it to the games, but let's take a sober look at it - these are not the BEST athletes in the world (the fact these very games are held are testament to the fact they are not as capable as those who are at the Olympics - otherwise they'd be there).

Secondly, there's so many sub-categories in so many of the sports based on the grade of the disability (such as the NZ cyclist who won her 500m time trial in the S10 category) that a gold medal quite simply isn't anywhere near as good an achievement as a bronze in the real Olympics, or even the Commonwealth games or - **** - even a placing in a world junior championship.

Thirdly, who's to say what events the host broadcaster was covering in Beijing? There may not have been pictures available for the NZ TV channels (and bear in mind it'd be even more difficult for TV3 to get footage, considering TVNZ has the rights to both the Olympics and Paralympics.

I stand by my statement. When a New Zealander wins a gold medal there deserves to be more than two sentences on a news broadcoast.