Beijing Paralympics set to begin

05/09/2008

Dozens of Balkan athletes will participate in the 13th Paralympics, opening Saturday in Beijing. The Paralympics is about competition, not disability. Many hope to return home with medals.

By Svetla Dimitrova for Southeast European Times -- 05/09/08

The Beijing 2008 Paralympics will open at the National Stadium on Saturday (September 6th). [Getty Images]

Less than two weeks after the end of the Beijing Olympics, final preparations are under way in the Chinese capital for the start of another elite sporting event. The 13th Paralympics will open on Saturday (September 6th) with another ceremony at the Bird's Nest stadium.

More than 4,000 athletes from six different disability groups, representing nearly 150 countries and regions in the world, will compete in 20 sports, including archery, athletics, cycling, equestrian, rowing, sailing, shooting, swimming, table and wheelchair tennis, volleyball (sitting) and wheelchair basketball. A total of 472 medal events will be staged during the 13-day event, which closes on September 17th.

It will be the first Paralympics in which Serbia and Montenegro will participate as two delegations.

The 14-member Serbian team includes athletes competing in shooting, athletics and table tennis. Among them are sprinter Nemanja Savkovic, table tennis players Borislava Peric and Nada Matic, and Milos Grlica, who won the bronze medal in the men's javelin in the 2004 Athens Paralympics, where he competed also in the men's 5,000m and long jump disciplines. The Serbian government provided about 200,000 euros for the national team's participation in the Beijing Games.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's (BiH) 27-member delegation, comprised of 15 athletes, left for Beijing on Monday with high hopes that the country's men volleyball (sitting) team will take the gold, as it did four years ago in Athens. Dzenita Klico and Dzevad Pandzic will represent BiH in the athletic competitions and Izudin Husanovic in shooting. Croatia has sent 25 paralympians to Beijing, including 13 competitors in the different athletic disciplines. Among them are Jelena Vukovic, who won the bronze medal in the women's discus in Athens and Milka Milinkovic, a veteran athlete, who has spent the last 40 years of her life in a wheelchair. She made her debut in Paralympics in the 1972 games in Heidelberg, winning a silver and a bronze medal as a member of the Yugoslav team.

Between 1980 and 1988, Milinkovic won a total of six more Paralympic medals -- two gold, one silver and three bronze -- for Yugoslavia. She took the bronze in the women's javelin in the 1992 Games in Barcelona, in which Croatia participated as an independent country for the first time. This will be Milinkovic's eighth Paralympics.

Mihovil Spanja is among the four swimmers who will represent Croatia in Beijing. He won three bronze medals in Athens -- the men's 100m backstroke, the 200m individual medley and the 400m freestyle.

Croatia will also participate in the shooting, table tennis, cycling and equestrian competitions.

Macedonia's two participants in the Beijing Games are shooters Vanco Karanfilov, the winner of the silver medal in the men's air pistol from Athens, and European champion Olivera Nakovska, who took sixth place in the women's air pistol competition in the 2004 Paralympics.

The Bulgarian Paralympics team includes eight members this year. Seven of them will compete in different athletic disciplines. Among them are European champion Dechko Ovcharov, who is competing in the men's javelin and discus, and Stela Ivanova, world champion in the women's discus and shot put. Ivanka Koleva, who won the gold in the women's shot put in the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, will also represent Bulgaria in those two disciplines, as well as in the women's power-lifting events.

Romania will be represented in the Games by cyclists Carol Eduard Novak, Arnold Csaba Butu, Lehel Ruzsa, tennis player Crina Steliana Tugui and Corina Viorica Custura, a power-lifter.

Turkey, whose shooter Muharrem Korhan Yamac won the country's two medals at the Athens Paralympics, hopes to see its 16 representatives, including eight women, do much better this time around.

"Eight Turkish athletes competed in the games in Athens in 2004 and won one gold and a bronze medal," Turkey's National Paralympics Committee Secretary-General Ibrahim Gumusdal told the Anadolu Agency in an interview on August 28th. "Now, we are going to Beijing with 16 athletes to win 5-6 medals in the sports of shooting, archery, power-lifting, table tennis, wheelchair tennis, athletics and judo."

Igor Jovanovic (Belgrade), Ivo Scepanovic (Zagreb), Tomislav Georgiev (Skopje) and Paul Ciocoiu (Bucharest) contributed to this report.