As the time for the official start of the Paris 2024 Paralympics approaches, many people are wondering who will be Greece’s flag bearers in this year’s prestigious event.
The Paralympics of Paris are expected to start on August 28th in the French capital, with Greece being hyped for this second athletic rendez-vous in Paris.
Greece will be represented by a total of 37 athletes. 24 of them men and 13 women.
These athletes who will proudly represent Greece will be competing across ten different Paralympic sports.
Among this talented group are ten athletes who stepped onto the podium in Tokyo in 2021. Greece won a total of 11 medals in Tokyo: one gold, three silver and seven bronze.
The French are promising a spectacular Opening Ceremony at the Place de la Concorde, unlike anything we have seen before.
Greece will enter the parade in alphabetical order and not first, as in the Olympic Games. The country announced recently its flag bearers for the event: Manolis Stefanoudakis and Theodora Paschalidou.
Manolis Stefanoudakis: A proud Paralympian
Manolis Stefanoudakis is a successful Paralympic javelin thrower. He will be participating in the Games for the fourth time, following his presence in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and London.
Stefanoudakis expressed his immense pride in being the one who had been chosen to carry the Greek flag during the opening ceremony. “Who wouldn’t want to hold the Greek flag and represent their country?” he told reporters recently.
Stefanoudakis won a bronze medal in the 2012 London Paralympics and a gold medal in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics. He has also won a gold in the 2023 World Championships that was held in Paris.
Theodora Paschalidou: fulfilling a dream
Theodora Paschalidou is a judo champion, who will be the other individual to be the flag bearer for Greece in the Opening ceremony of the Paris Paralympics. “The flag is something I have dreamed of for years, and the fact that I will hold it in my hands is the highest honor, as it is for every athlete,” she told reporters recently.
Paschalidou won last year the prestigious ”top athlete with a disability” award in a ceremony organized by PSAT, the Panhellenic Association of Sports Media.
What are the Paralympics?
The Paralympic Games is an athletic event where the participating athletes have some form of disability. The first Paralympics took place in 1960 in Rome.
Nonetheless, the roots of the Paralympics can be traced back to twelve years before that, in 1948. Dr. Ludwig Guttmann organized the first competition for wheelchair athletes in Stoke Mandeville, England on the same day as the opening of the London Olympics. This event became the seed that blossomed into the Paralympics that we know today.
Greece participated for the first time in the Paralympics of 1972.
The word Paralympics comes from the Greek word Paraolympiakoi. Para means alongside and Olympiakoi (Agones) is obviously, the Olympic (Games).
Since the 1988 Summer Paralympicsin Seoul and the 1992 Winter Paralympics in Albertville, the Paralympic Games have taken place in the same cities and venues as the Olympics due to an agreement between the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC).