The Ukrainian team has finished The Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games with the result of 74 medals. The national team has shown the record results in the history of Ukraine by winning 24 Gold medals, 18 Silver medals and 32 bronze medals. It has been reported that the united Ukrainian sports team has taken the 4th place in the rating list of 147 countries participated in the Paralympic competitions.
The first place was won by the Chinese sportsmen, with the result of 211 medals; the second place by the united sport team from Great Britain with the result of 102 medals and the third one was the USA’s winning 99 medals. The days of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games had a total of 472 medal events.
On September,17, the 2008 Paralympic Games officially came to the end in Chinese city of Beijing. According to the tradition, the Paralympic Games have always been held in the same year and the same venue as the Olympic Games. This year the event has been started two weeks after the end of Olympic Games.
In 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttmann organized a sports competition involving World War II veterans with a spinal cord injury in Stoke Mandeville, England. Four years later, competitors from the Netherlands joined the games and an international movement was born. Olympic style games for athletes with a disability were organized for the first time in Rome in 1960, now called Paralympics. In Toronto in 1976, other disability groups were added and the idea of merging together different disability groups for international sport competitions was born. In the same year, the first Paralympic Winter Games took place in Sweden.
Today, the Paralympics are elite sport events for athletes from different disability groups, which includes spinal injury, amputee, visually impaired, cerebral palsy and les autres.
They emphasize, however, the participants' athletic achievements rather than their disability.
The slogan for the Beijing Paralympic Games was “One World One Dream”, and the emblem was dubbed “Sky, Earth and Human Beings”, which is a stylized figure of an athlete in motion, implying the tremendous efforts a person with a disability has to make in sports as well as in real life.
The Winter Paralympics 2010 will be in Vancouver, Canada. London will host the Paralympics in 2012 and Sochi will be the host of the 2014 Winter Paralympics.
