'A giant hug for athletes' Paris rolls out the blue carpet for Paralympians

Plastered on the walls of every Métro station in Paris this week are adverts boasting some boundary-pushing Franglais.

- Paul MacInnes

Alongside images of Paralympic athletes running, leaping and wheeling is a slogan directed at residents of the French capital. It reads: "Game [is not] over."

For those unfamiliar with 1980s video arcade jargon, "game over" was the message that heralded the moment a machine ate your money. The grammatically tortuous "is not" has been overlaid by the organisers of Paris 2024 to remind locals that the summer of sporting excellence has not finished. The Paralympic Games begin tonight, and every Parisian is welcome.

After months of anxiety over low ticket sales and concerns over whether a French audience would embrace disability sport, the news in recent days has been good. More than 2m tickets have been sold for the Games, out of a total of 2.5m, with a number of events sold out.

The Île-de-France regional government has announced an ambition to make the Paris Métro accessible to wheelchair users at last, one of the abiding issues of concern around the Games.

And tonight comes an opening ceremony that will again take place in the heart of the city and that organisers say will act as a "gigantic hug" to the 4,400 athletes who will compete in Paris in the next 11 days.

Starting on the Champs-Élysées, the opening parade will move along "the world's most beautiful avenue" before a more traditional ceremony takes place in the open air at the Place de la Concorde.

Continuing Paris's theme of being "open" to everyone, organisers say they want to extend the general message of welcome and inclusion to one specific to people with disabilities.