I’m truly delighted with how well the tickets sales have gone – there’s been a great response from the Great British public to Paralympic tickets. That’s done now, a fantastic first ticket application, but there’s a still a great opportunity to get your hands on Paralympic tickets.

We go back on sale on 2 December, and there are a number of sports that are still available. We have a number of tickets for various sessions in Athletics, so it’s a great opportunity to get inside the Stadium and experience world-class athletics. Maybe you’ll see Oscar Pistorius, the blade runner, or maybe Britain’s David Weir, defending his gold medal from Beijing.

Similarly, there are a number of tickets available for Swimming, particularly in the morning sessions, so another great chance to be in one of the most iconic venues on the Park. It’s the first thing that people see when they walk over the bridge into the Park, a beautiful venue, and this is a fantastic opportunity to see Paralympic Swimming.

Day passes

We wanted to really enable people to have the opportunity, if they’ve never come to a Paralympic Games before, to come and check out a range of sports on the same ticket. We’ve got Olympic Park day passes and ExCeL day passes, with quite good availability across both of them. If you’ve got an ExCeL day pass you might be able to take in Boccia, Sitting Volleyball and Wheelchair Fencing, for example.

On the Olympic Park you might be able to take in one of the Football events, a Wheelchair Basketball prelim, or maybe some Wheelchair Tennis. It’s a great opportunity to have a full day out, maybe with the family, and have a great experience. A great opportunity for people to think ‘have I got tickets, do I want more tickets, do I want to get involved with the Paralympic Games’ – it won’t happen again in our lifetime. 2 December is the best chance to get your hands on a ticket and come and experience sport like never before.

Affordable and accessible

We were really keen to ensure that in the ticket offer there was the potential for people to come and have a Paralympic experience, whether they’ve been to the Games before or not; to have a Paralympic experience which may involve a sport, or a number of sports, but certainly involve getting into some of our iconic venues and getting onto the Park. And, crucially, one which involves the ability to potentially come as a group of friends, or as a family, because of the affordability and accessibility of tickets.

50 per cent of tickets are £10 or under – this is a great opportunity to come and experience something unique in Great Britain for relatively decent prices.

It’s absolutely crucial that we have packed-out stadia of excited fans, not just screaming but positively roaring home Great British paralympians. I want to make sure that within that Great British roar you can hear accents from across the entire United Kingdom.

Test events

The testing and readiness programme is incredibly important to the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games. We’ve already had the first cluster of test events, and within that there’s been Paralympic-specific elements tested. For example, in the Marathon we had a number of wheelchair races and visually impaired races testing the course.

On the first weekend of December we have the first standalone Paralympic sport test event, which is taking place in the Handball Arena. It’s Goalball, a Paralympic-specific sport for visually impaired athletes.

It’s really exciting we’re now starting to roll out some of the Paralympic standalone sport test events. I think there will be tremendous learnings from these and it will be an incredible opportunity for everyone involved. Not least the athletes, who will really experience the venue, get a feel for what this is going to be like at Games time and really get an understanding of how we are delivering on our promise to put athletes at the heart of these Games. This means all they have to focus on is giving the performance of their lives, and we will have hopefully taken care of all the detail!