My good friend Surena Chande wrote a list of 20 cool facts about the Paralympic Games for Metro to mark the start of the Tokyo Games today.
One of my favourite ones was this:
- Contrary to popular belief, the name Paralympics has nothing to do with the merging of the words ‘paralysis’ and ‘Olympics’, but instead stems from the Greek word ‘para’ meaning ‘alongside’ or ‘next to’.
I never took the time to look this up so just assumed it was related to ‘paraplegic’ (and apparently that was the original meaning but it became redundant and they changed it to the above, according to the official website.)