Glittering ceremony sets.stage for sporting drama

Just days before Paralympians last gathered for their Winter Games in Beijing, Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine.

- JAMES TONEY

One year later Yevhenii Korinets, from Zhytomyr Oblast on the border of Belarus, lost his leg during a bitter fire fight in Minkivka.

Life can come at you faster than a double amputee sprinter on carbon-fibre blades sometimes, with Korinets making his Paralympic debut as a sitting volleyball player this week.

Six years ago, Canadian rower Jacob Wassermann was paralysed from the waist down in a bus crash that claimed the lives of 16 of his junior ice hockey teammates. Australian table tennis hope Ma Lin was just five years old when his right arm was eaten by a brown bear during a family trip to a zoo in China.

And then there is Ibrahim Hamadtou, a double arm amputee who plays table tennis with the bat in his mouth, and Iran’s sitting volleyball star Morteza Mehrzad, at eight foot the world’s second tallest man, whose right leg is 15 centimetres shorter than his left.

There are 4,000 similar tales at these Games, though it would be too easy, too trite to turn coverage into saccharine and cliched human interest stories of triumph, adversity and a life without limits.

But these athletes – with perhaps just a handful of exceptions – are not household names, context is valuable, even if not a single one would allow you to define them by their disability.