London 2012 blog

On Friday I was in South West Wales, visiting the Disability Wheelchair Spectacular at the National Indoor Arena in Cardiff.

We started the day off in Swansea at the South West Wales Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Briefing for Businesses where we talked about the opportunities for contracts from the Games.

It is really important that businesses across the UK understand that there will be lots of opportunities for them to compete for business.

I went straight from there to the Liberty Stadium, an amazing stadium that is home to Swansea City and Neath Ospreys. Here we participated in the Welsh Local Government Association conference, which provided a fantastic opportunity to talk about the role for Local Government in delivering the Games.

After this, we headed down to Cardiff to see the Wheelchair Spectacular hosted by Disability Sports Wales. If you've never seen wheelchair sports before, I can tell you - they are pretty amazing, and it can be rough stuff, certainly not for the feint hearted.

There were over 300 young people with a variety of disabilities competing in everything from Boccia to Athletics, Netball to Hockey.

With Emma Bennett:



Wales already has a great track record in disability sport, and it's not surprising having seen what I saw today. Opportunities for disability sport have risen from just 1,200 in 2002 to 103,000 by 2007.

So many of the kids I met are really determined to push themselves, and not allow their disability to get in the way. I hope that they will all get involved with the Games in one way or another in the years to come.

At the Wheelchair Basketball 'tip off':