In a year of many highlights, too many to mention really, I have to say mine is witnessing Great Britain's Jonnie Peacock win gold in the 100m T44 on "Thriller Thursday" at London 2012.

Since January 2011 when Jerome Singleton won the world title in New Zealand in a thrilling photo finish, I'd made it my goal to build the men's 100m T44 Paralympic final into the "must see" race of London 2012.

What has been achieved by the Paralympic Movement in the UK this year has been nothing short of phenomenal. We got a sense something incredible could happen when, at One Year to Go, we saw Trafalgar Square packed with people eager to find out more about Paralympic sport.

But who would have thought that the Games would be a sell out, with stadia full for every session, that almost 40 million people would watch the coverage on Channel 4 or that our athletes would have been on the front and back pages of every newspaper throughout the Games?

The level of engagement in those amazing 11 days was something that was beyond our wildest dreams and what has followed since has also exceeded expectations. Within five days of the Closing Ceremony, we had sealed a deal with a major commercial sponsor in Sainsbury's - added to that already in place with BT and with more on the way that shows clearly the appetite there is to engage. 

Paula Dunn, freshly announced as UK Athletics' Paralympic head coach - replacing Peter Eriksson, the Swede who is now head coach of the UK Athletics able-bodied athletics programme - is wearing a smart suit and blouse and is entirely at home in the surroundings of the Loughborough High Performance Centre.

From our position on the top floor balcony, we can see athletes going through their paces on the indoor track below, the claps and endorsements of their coaches echoing up into the arena. As a former sprinter who earned European and Commonwealth Games medals, Dunn – who has worked for the last three years under Eriksson with responsibility for bringing new talent through – knows all about the demands and requirements of elite performers.

On the staircase behind Dunn, a series of posters offer advice to up-and-coming athletes. "Get that 'niggle' checked or your dreams could be wrecked" reads one. Another reminds youngsters of the need to check thoroughly any nutritional supplements they are about to use, adding, "Don't ruin your fairytale ending".


Dunn, meanwhile, is reflecting upon her own experience of a fairytale ending - a tale which she helped create herself - when she watched Jonnie Peacock win Paralympic gold at London 2012 in the T44/43 100 metres final in an Olympic Stadium full of spectators chanting "Pea-cock, Pea-cock" and watched by a peak television audience of 6.7 million viewers.

"In 2009 when I first started, Jonnie was the person I saw when I first started the job. He was the first person I met on my first day in work. Absolutely true. His mother had been in contact, and I was told that we had a new sprinter down in Cambridge. So I travelled down to see this young schoolboy who hadn't had any coaching and he was a bit lost.

"So we got him involved in the sport and fixed him up with a coach in Cambridge and he raced at Crystal Palace later that year. And after that he just went from strength to strength. So we get along very well, Jonnie and me.

"When I first met him I thought he had character. To put yourself forward and to say 'I want to do this' shows great strength of character, so I liked that. And when I saw him move, you could see he was good. He had just naturally quick legs. It was just a case of putting him into a good environment and watching him progress.

"We kept in really close contact all the time. He went to the World Championships in 2011 and did really well. He came sixth in the final. He then made a transition to Lee Valley being coached by Dan Pfaff.

"So when I saw Jonnie in that Olympic Stadium and all those people started shouting his name. And he just managed himself. And we heard that 6.7 million people had been watching. It was pretty phenomenal to think that three years earlier he wasn't doing anything and in 2012 there he is, competing – and winning a gold. It was absolutely amazing.

"The success of our Paralympic athletes in London will probably turn out to be our biggest legacy. People will have seen the athletes on TV and started to think that maybe they could do the same thing."


By way of indication, the forthcoming British Paralympic Association's (BPA) sporting festival (December 2 and 3) has already attracted more than 800 potential athletes across all sports to sign up.

In her new role, she is determined to ensure that the Great Leap Forward represented by the 2012 Paralympics - where Britain's Paralympic track and field athletes, who had managed only two golds at the Beijing 2008 Paralympics, finished third in the medals table with 11 golds and a total of 29 medals - is followed by Another Giant Stride.

"Obviously London 2012 was really good," she says. "But that was only three years into our programme, and effectively only two years in because it took us a time to establish things. So I think our biggest success in terms of recruitment came after we finished second in the table at the World Championships in 2011.

"I still think there's lots of talent out there that we haven't unearthed. I think that's one of our key messages. As you know, in Paralympic sport you can find someone who in 12 months could be a potential medallist.

"We have got a better system of contacts for athletes coming through now with minimal disabilities, and in the last six months we have picked up two very exciting talents. We have also forged strong links with the Help for Heroes scheme to identify potential future athletes.

"And the majority of our team is young, and so a lot of them should still be around in 2016. So it's still very exciting and I think we can exceed what we did in 2012, although it's not going to be easy. But I'm up for the challenge and the team I work with are up for the challenge, and I've no doubt the coaches and athletes involved will want to be doing that as well."


Dunn has changed very little from the time when I interviewed her - for The Guardian - around the time that she competed at the Seoul 1988 Olympics, where she competed in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay. She still has one of the most radiant faces you will ever see.

At 47, she has spent 11 years working within the UK Athletics Performance team, the last three of which as performance transition director for the Paralympics programme.

"Peter and I gelled from start," she says. "We believed that a no-compromise attitude created the right environment for success. We created that environment for the athletes. He really mentored me. I already knew athletics, but he showed me the intricacies of Paralympic athletics, and he is the one who has motivated me to think big.

"It was mostly about learning the rules, and about the IPC and the different classes of competition. But essentially track and field is track and field, and Paralympic athletes have all the same concerns and issues as athletes within the mainstream. There's absolutely no difference. There was no clear pathway for athletes established when Peter and I started so we created that."

Recruiting new talent, through the UK Athletics Parallel Success programme and funded by Aviva, began to draw new athletes into the sport.

"Since 2009 we have brought 456 new athletes into the sport," Dunn says, adding that this role is now to be played by former Commonwealth 400m hurdler Katie Jones.

"It was difficult to start with. When we did our first talent day in 2009 we could only get 22 potential athletes, and that was after going through all the different disability groups. So it was a bit shallow. We had to start from scratch."

Britain's Paralympic athletes, and Paula Dunn, have come a long way in a short time.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the past five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames.

What a summer this has been.

The Olympic Games exceeded even the highest expectations and the outstanding performances of our athletes left the country on a high. After a brief respite, we did it all again. The Paralympic Games were regarded as the biggest and best the world has ever seen and Britain's athletes landed a spectacular haul of more than 100 medals, including four gold medals for our very own Deloitte Ambassador Sarah Storey.

More importantly perhaps, I feel this will be a landmark moment in changing the attitudes of a nation towards people with a disability.

Our firm has had a transformational impact on disability sport in the UK but now the Games are over, we ask what will be the legacy of Deloitte's support and how do we ensure the disability sport movement in the UK continues to go from strength to strength?

One of the central objectives of London 2012 was to "inspire a generation". There is no doubt that the performances have been inspiring but will this translate into increased participation?

It is no easy task.

However, the early signs within disability sport look positive.

Back in 2007, in partnership with the British Paralympic Association (BPA), Deloitte created Parasport, a website that signposts people with a disability to sporting opportunities.

Over 37,500 people visited the site between August 29 and September 10, the period of the Paralympic Games. This compares with 1,400 people during the same period last year, an increase of more than 2,000 per cent.

Parasport saw a 2,000 per cent increase in visitors during the London 2012 Paralympic Games by comparison with the same period the previous year

A significant majority of visitors to the site have used the "Find a Club" function suggesting that people have been inspired by the performances of ParalympicsGB and want to get more active. Almost 3,000 sports clubs are now registered on the site and the integrity of that data is thanks to the countless hours volunteered by Deloitte people over the past five years.

This site will not only help to boost the number of people participating in disability sport, but also acts as a first step in the process of finding the Paralympians of the future. Sam Scowen, a Paralympic rower, found her first club through Deloitte Parasport. Her talent was spotted and she was recommended for a "Paralympic Potential" day. Sam finished just outside the medals at London 2012, fourth place in the TA mixed doubles scull – and is now looking to Rio 2016.

At the same time as helping to create Parasport, Deloitte also signed up to a five-year partnership with SportsAid to support the disability programme of the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS). Through the scheme, which provides financial support to athletes to help them stay in full-time education as well as pursuing sporting performance, Deloitte has awarded more than 500 bursaries to over 300 athletes.

Sam Scowen and Nick Beighton in action at Eton Dorney during London 2012

Our initial objective for TASS was to support 22 Paralympic competitors but as we developed the programme, the difference our support was making became clear. At Beijing 2008, 33 Deloitte supported athletes competed and our ambition for London soared. Seventy-six current or former recipients of Deloitte funding competed at London 2012 and we are very proud that those athletes delivered a total of eight gold, seven silver and eight bronze medals between them. But the counting doesn't stop at London.

Many of the athletes in receipt of funding from Deloitte are winter athletes so will be aiming to compete at Sochi 2014, while others are talented young athletes who want to represent their country in Rio in four years' time. Deloitte's TASS athletes will be competing at Paralympic Games for years to come.

Finally, in 2010 we established a new corporate cycling challenge, Deloitte Ride Across Britain. The aim of the event was to raise £1 million ($1.6 million/€1.3 million) for the BPA by the 2013 Ride. However, we are pleased to announce that this target has been smashed 12 months early.

Sarah Storey during the Deloitte Ride Across Britain

Storey took receipt of the £1 million ($1.6 million/€1.3 million) cheque last Tuesday (September 18) night before getting back on her bike on Wednesday to join our riders on the 104-mile stage between Haydock Park and Penrith. With the fundraising total now topping £1.1 million ($1.7 million/€1.4 million), this is great news for the BPA since it will continue to be the lead benefiting charity from the event in 2013 and so will receive a further financial boost as planning begins in earnest for Sochi and Rio.

We've already set out how the impact of our disability sport programme will continue to be felt beyond London. In addition, we have begun conversations with the BPA about how we can continue to support the development of disability sport in the UK in future.

Deloitte believes in long-term partnerships and this will not change just because the Paralympic flag has been lowered on London.

Heather Hancock is lead London 2012 partner at Deloitte

By Tom Degun

There is one woman from the United States who indisputably – not even arguably – owns the title of the greatest ever Paralympian. Her name is Trischa Zorn.

The 48-year-old swimmer, who has been blind since birth, has featured in seven consecutive Paralympic Games from Arnhem 1980 to Athens 2004.

Competing mostly in the B2 disability class, Zorn has won a staggering 55 medals which consist of an incredible 41 golds, nine silvers and five bronze.

By Tom Degun

For a moment, let us look at the entire Paralympic Movement as a human body.

The face would have to be South Africa's Oscar Pistorius (pictured below), the double-leg amputee, known as "Blade Runner", and the most recognisable Paralympic athlete on the planet. The mouth would be International Paralympic Committee (IPC) President Sir Philip Craven, the most powerful man in the Movement, responsible for voicing the direction it moves in. The blood cells would be the thousands of athletes whose inspirational stories of triumph over adversity makes the Paralympic Movement such a unique and special entity.

But its heart would be the IPC chief executive Xavier Gonzalez, the man who unassumingly keeps the whole thing ticking.

By Tom Degun

While many Britons were left in shock earlier this month when David Beckham was omitted from Stuart Pearce's football squad for the London 2012 Olympics, the Sinclair family were celebrating a piece of history.

Scott Sinclair (pictured below, right), the highly talented Swansea City winger who has been one of the Premier League's biggest stars over the past season, was named in Pearce's 18-strong team, joining older brother Martin (pictured below, left) at London 2012 who had been selected in April for the ParalympicsGB seven-a-side cerebral palsy team.

Scott's inclusion in the Olympic team made them the first pair of brothers to represent Britain at the Olympics and Paralympics at the same Games.

By Tom Degun

Chris Holmes (pictured) stands on the verge of something very special because if the London 2012 Paralympic Games are the huge success they are predicted to be, he will have played a monumental role as the Organising Committee's director of Paralympic Integration, effectively London 2012's lead for the Paralympic Games.

How Holmes actually ended up in the prestigious position is a fascinating tale.

As a young teenager, Holmes was a talented swimmer with achievable Olympic ambitions, but aged just 14, he woke up one morning to find he had completely lost his eyesight. The harrowing ordeal was the result of a rare genetic eye disorder called Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy.

By Tom Degun

There is cruel irony that seven years ago one of London's greatest ever days was followed directly by one of its most tragic.

It was on July 6, 2005, that International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge announced that London had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and across the city, people were celebrating deliriously.

But those celebrations were bought to a dramatic halt less than 24 hours later when a series of coordinated terrorist suicide attacks on London's public transport system killed 52 people and injured 700 more people.

The story of Alex Zanardi, the motor racing driver who has become a major medal contender at the London 2012 Paralympics, is almost as unbelievable as it is inspiring.

Born in the city of Bologna in Northern Italy, Zanardi was spotted as an exceptional racing driver when driving karts as a teenager. So it was no surprise when he soon graduated to Formula One, the pinnacle of the profession, in 1991.

He later switched to CART, where he was named Champ Racing Rookie of the Year, and had another stint at Formula One before returning to CART once again in 2000.

By Tom Degun

To mark 100 days to go to the London 2012 Paralympic Games last month, UK Athletics took the opportunity to announce that Sophia Warner was to take up the high profile position of commercial director at the organisation with effect from October this year.

In the world of sport, Warner is best known as the T35 cerebral palsy athlete who won two medals at the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Athletics World Championships in Christchurch last year and as an athlete who stands a strong chance of more medal glory at London 2012.

By Tom Degun

My experience of the Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games was certainly a memorable one.

There were safety and security fears bandied around virtually every second, huge delays over the construction of the venues to the point that work was going on literally hours before the start of the competition and an enormous athlete boycott that meant the likes of Usain Bolt and Jessica Ennis were nowhere in sight.

But one of my most vivid memories of the event was seeing Craig Hunter (pictured below), who was serving as Chef de Mission to the English team, acting as an unflappable beacon of calm throughout the storm that encircled him.

Deloitte and the British Paralympic Association (BPA) are in a celebratory mood, as the Deloitte Parasport website, a search engine for disability sport, has just turned five years old – a huge milestone in the disability sport field.

Back in 2007, we started working with disabled athletes and identified that disability sport was an under supported area, and wanted to help change this ahead of London 2012. We met with the BPA and together sought to tackle one of the main challenges they had identified: in order to have a great Paralympic team you need a pipeline of people entering disability sport at grass roots level.


To find the people at grass roots level, you need to be able to identify and develop those talented individuals so they can be on as successful as the likes of Sarah Storey (pictured). And so, working in partnership, Parasport was born.

Our team at Deloitte worked with the BPA and identified the barriers preventing disabled people from accessing sport and identified the areas that were lacking across the United Kingdom. We discovered there were some excellent disability facilities and clubs being provided by the National Governing Bodies, but what became apparent was the lack of signposting to local opportunities and awareness that these clubs existed.  Even clearer was the need for a tool to help disabled people find out which sports might be suitable for them to participate in.  This research and insight bore the seeds of Parasport, a website which has become "the" search engine for disability sport.

The website www.parasport.org.uk houses a "Classification Wizard", allowing the visitor to enter details on their impairment, and is then provided with a list of sports that might be suitable for them. The user is then able to choose a sport and is directed to a local club that has been quality assured, to ensure a high standard of accessibility and support for disabled people is on offer.


The website is now used by a range of people, from those who want to play recreational sport to keep them active, to others that have aspirations to represent ParalympicsGB at a Paralympic Games. Some users have managed to realise their dreams and are now competing at international level – including Sam Scowen (pictured above, right) whose father used the site to find a rowing club for Sam, and she is now part of the British adaptive rowing squad.

Since Deloitte Parasport was launched in 2007, over 2,000 clubs across the UK have registered with the site, which has received over 22 million hits. On average in 2012, the website received 40,000 visits a month, which is a huge amount of people across the UK using this facility to become more active.


Everyone at Deloitte is enormously proud of this programme and of what they have been able to achieve so far. London 2012 provides the biggest opportunity of all to inspire disabled people to take up sport and perhaps one day follow in the footseps of 11-time Paralympic champion Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson (pictured) , and when the Games has been and gone Deloitte Parasport will be part of maintaining the momentum post-Games, helping all those inspired by what they have seen to find their personal best in sport.

Catherine Bayley is the London 2012 sponsorship manager at Deloitte

By Mike Rowbottom

If Great Britain's Paralympic footballers wanted a measure of how realistic their chances are of making the podium at the London 2012 Games they got it at the recently completed BT Paralympic World Cup in Manchester.

There, in the Arena alongside the mighty Etihad Stadium, which a decade ago reverberated with nationalistic pride during a Commonwealth Games, at times resembling the last night of the Proms, they laboured selflessly to earn a silver medal.

The United States were dismissed 7-0, just hours after Lyndon Lynch's squad had what many of them described as an inspirational meeting with Roy Hodgson's newly gathered England squad on the eve of their 1-0 victory in Norway.

By David Gold

The Special Olympics is the world's largest sports organisation for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, not to be confused with the Paralympic Games, as it so often is. The difference between the two is subtle, but crucial nonetheless. Indeed, the Special Olympics is for individuals with intellectual disabilities, whereas the Paralympics is generally for athletes with any disability, including physical, and only at an elite level.

Timothy Shriver, the chairman of the Special Olympics, insists, however, that he is not concerned about people who get his organisation's work confused with the Paralympics.

"I think that what we share in common is that we are trying to use the power of sport to change the way the world sees people who have differences," he told insideworldparasport. "As long as we are doing it and they are I'm not going to kill myself over our logos getting mixed up or people coming up to me after the Paralympics and saying 'good job'. We're confused everywhere and we are collaborative and friendly and have very good relationships with the International Paralympic Committee (IPC)."