http://www.madid.com.au/vid_madi_08.htm

Silver Medal for our Madi! YAY!

What an awesome effort from the Chinese team - six seconds!!!! OMG!

Is that still going? Have heardly heard a pop here....

Well done though.....

The whole event was totally inspiring.

I saw the marathon last night (didn't realise they did one in the Para-olympics) ... imagine pushing a wheel-chair 40+kilometres to win the marathon!!

What role-models these people are!!

I was also in Beijing over the weekend and watched some events. The wheelchair events were not what impressed me. I imagine that it is easier to push a wheelchair over the marathon than to run it. The times produced by the wheelchair athletics are actually faster than those of their normal olympic counterparts in the middle distance events I watched. What really humbled me was how a one-handed swimmer could swim the 50m a lot faster than my best time ever when I was swimming competitively in my younger days.

The upper body strength of a wheelchair track athlete is what impresses me - not so much the comparison of times between wheelchair athletes and able bodied.

My humbling moments were:

**seeing Kurt Fernley push to Gold in the marathon after ongoing trouble in previous events - what a well deserved gold.

**Seeing the young Aussie CP track athlete struggling not to pass out/throw up during the medal ceremony due to the build up of lactic acid - now that's intestinal fortitude.

**And the 'murderball' wheelchair rugby athletes - these competitors are all MORE than paraplegic - they are tetraplegic and quadriplegic (obviously not total) - Ryley Batt the Aussie Superstar of the team was born without legs, and without fingers on his hands - and he was the least disabled of his team! Most were disabled due to car accidents, motorbike accidents, diving into shallow water or surfing accidents - but there they were competing for thier country in what appears for all intents as a dalek like smash up derby!

I tip my hat to every single one of these athletes! Awesome work - and an inspiration.

Just watched the Andrew Denton interview with Kurt Fearnley. (We'd taped it before!) He is quite a guy, and had a punishing program for the games, "I had one rest day" he said.

The whole lot of them amaze me, but the young chinese swimmer without arms was absolutely phenomenal! the only differemce between him swimming freestyle and butterfly was the kick style. Still an outstanding achievement.