'Cutthroat' Competition Returns to Paris

On the tail of the Summer Olympics, Paris welcomes another major athletic competition on Wednesday: the Paralympics, where 4,000-plus athletes with different levels of physical, visual, and intellectual impairments will vie for medals in nearly two dozen sports, per the AP. More than 2 million tickets have been sold, according to organizers, and International Paralympic Committee chief Andrew Parsons says the competition "will be the most spectacular Paralympic Games ever," reports the BBC. More:

• Opening ceremony: Starting at 8pm local time, the athletes from more than 180 delegations will proceed down the Champs-Elysees to the Place de la Concorde, where Thomas Jolly—the artistic director of the event who also put together the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies—says spectators will be witness to "performances that have never been seen before," in a "spectacle that will unite spectators and television audiences worldwide around the unique spirit of the Paralympic Games," per Olympics.com.
• First few days: NBC News details the events that will kick off the 11-day competition, including men's wheelchair basketball, women's sitting volleyball, and goalball, "a competition for the visually impaired, who wear blindfolds and try to score a ball into their opponent's net while using their whole bodies to defend."

• 'Fastest-growing' event: That would be boccia, a precision ball sport that resembles bocce, or lawn bowling. CNN takes a closer look at what's quickly become a "fan favorite."
• Origin story: SI dives into the Paralympics' humble beginnings in 1948, when a German doctor organized the first competition for wheelchair athletes to kick off the Summer Olympics in London. Since then, "just as [Dr. Ludwig] Guttmann hoped, and as Paralympians have demonstrated over decades, the Games are a showcase of sportsmen and women in their own right."
• Cheating: The Washington Post notes that the Paralympics has grown over the years into the third-largest sports competition globally, and with that growth has come an increase in "classification doping"—ie, athletes fibbing about their disability levels. If viewers knew "how cutthroat" the competition really was "and what's going on behind closed doors, they'd be so shocked," says Oksana Masters, an American double amputee who will compete in handcycling.
• Classifications: Here's how athletes are categorized by medical and technical experts, according to their disabilities.
• Schedule: Check out the full lineup of events here. NPR lays out how to watch.

(Meet some of the highlighted athletes.)