Key facts

Venues: Olympic Stadium (track and field events); The Mall (road events)
Dates: Friday 31 August – Sunday 9 September 2012
Medal events: 170
Athletes: 1,100 (740 men, 360 women)

With 1,100 athletes competing for 170 gold medals, Athletics is the largest sport on the Paralympic programme. There are various different strands to the competition: track events, in distances from 100m to 5,000m; field events, which include the High Jump and Shot Put; and the Marathon, which is held on the roads. Some athletes compete in wheelchairs or throwing frames, others with prostheses, and others with the guidance of a sighted companion.

The basics

Staged in the brand new Olympic Stadium, the track events will be held over distances ranging from 100m to 5000m. Track events may begin with heats, with the best athletes eventually qualifying for the finals.

The field events broadly fall into two categories. The list of throwing events includes Discus, Javelin, Shot Put and Club Throw, while the programme of jumping events includes High Jump, Long Jump and Triple Jump.

The men’s and women’s Marathons will be held on the streets of central London on the 9 September, and will be straight finals.

As well as having the largest number of events and athletes at the Games, Athletics also has the largest number of classes. Each athlete is given a two-digit number: the first digit indicates the nature of the athlete’s impairment while the second indicates the amount of functional ability the athlete has. The lower the number, the greater the impact that the athlete’s impairment has on his or her ability to compete.

• Classes 11-13 are for athletes with visual impairment.
• Class 20 is for athletes with an intellectual impairment.
• Classes 31-38 are for athletes with Cerebral Palsy, with classes 31 to 34 using a wheelchair to compete.
• Classes 40-46 are for athletes with a loss of limb or limb deficiency.
• Classes 51-58 cover wheelchair racers or field athletes who throw from a seated position.

Paralympic Athletics, past and present

Part of the Paralympic programme since the first Games in Rome in 1960, the sport of Athletics has produced some of the most iconic images in the history of the Paralympic movement, with legendary figures such as Louise Sauvage, Baroness Grey-Thompson and Oscar Pistorius making their names before a worldwide audience.

For London 2012, all track and field events will be held at the Olympic Stadium in the new Olympic Park. This state-of-the-art venue, which will have a capacity of 80,000 during the Games, will also host the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

Jargon buster

- Cage: The area from which competitors throw a discus or club. The mouth of the cage is 6m wide, and sits 7m in front of the centre of the throwing circle.
- Countback: The process used to determine the winner of any field event in which two or more athletes are tied.
- Guide runner: Visually impaired runners use a guide runner, usually someone from their own country, to assist them in completing the course of a race safely and as quickly as possible by running alongside them during the race and ‘guiding’ them to stay in their lane.
- Lifting: When throwing from a throwing frame, seated athletes sometimes finish in a standing position before releasing the implement. This is called ‘lifting’, and is against the rules if the athlete doesn’t have a foot on the ground.
- Points score: In field events that are contested by athletes from different classification groups, a points score will be used to determine the winners.

See Paralympic Athletics in action on ParalympicSportTV

See the London 2012 Paralympic Games competition schedule

Get involved

See also