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One of the questions I frequently get asked is how can we make both Games relevant to people living outside London. It is an important question because in Games past it has often been a concept overlooked. Of course for some countries this is geographically more of a challenge than for others. I have always felt that the size of the UK makes this a much more realisable ambition than for instance in Atlanta, where trying to bridge a four hour flight and three time zones in Seattle was a tougher ask. That’s why we set up our Nations and Regions teams where relevance becomes apparent because local opportunity, driven by the inspiration of the Games, is scoped out at a local level by teams on the ground.

Last year I visited a remarkable college in Hereford for the visually impaired (Royal National College for the Blind) on one of my Nations and Regions trips. I attended a school in Sheffield that for the very first time integrated visually impaired pupils into a mainstream school. By the time I was 14 I was very familiar with the Perkins Braille machine and the use of tape recorders sitting alongside writing paper and pencils. My visit to the College that day took me back to my earlier school years. The three students that joined us went on to higher education as academic achievers.

Sport, however, was a challenge. That’s why on the second half of my visit to the College I was so pleased to see an elite group of footballers, aided by FA coaches in training for the Paralympic Games here in Beijing.

A number of the players that day had recently reached the quarter finals of the World Championships where they had lost narrowly to Argentina, a familiar and rather wearing story for all football fans. There is little need for me to expand upon the extraordinary skills needed to play the Game where your auditory senses are the only chance of making contact with the ball, let alone dribbling past defenders and then beating a fully sighted goal keeper.

Yesterday morning I dashed straight from the airport to the Hockey centre, now transformed in to 5- and 7 a-side football pitches, to see many of those same players and the coaching squad in action against Spain. Evenly-matched until the last quarter, Spain took their chances and won. Post-match interviews and team talk out of the way (you don’t intrude on the latter, I have had to sit through too many myself) I wandered into the changing room to wish them luck for the rest of their campaign which includes matches against Brazil and Argentina. No pressure there then!

As I left the stadium the BBC were still analysing the match and interviewing the players. More and more people in Great Britain are watching Paralympic sport because we have a media presence. Too much of the world would unfortunately be missing out completely if it wasn't for the International Paralympic Committees’ internet television service.

This too must be a challenge that the world's media needs to rise to in 2012 if we are to use power of the Games to inspire change.

*This first appeared in today's Daily Telegraph