The crowds have been stunning

By any measurable standard it has been the best ever: bigger crowds, far more publicity, heavier sponsorship, even efficient transport, always a bugbear at these events.

In particular, the crowds have been stunning. I have covered a number of sports events for disabled athletes in my time, usually attended by a couple of fond relatives, a guide dog and an eerie silence.

Deafening cheers

And even at former Paralympics, such as Atlanta in 1996, the audiences were depressingly threadbare.

And yet here, Olympic Boulevard, the spine which runs through the complex and from which Stadium Australia and the other sporting venues radiate, has been a heaving sea of people every day for the past fortnight.

Athletes wander off the track or emerge from the swimming pool, bemused at the wall of sound which has attended their efforts.

Fran Stanley of Australia leads Astrid Wagner of Germany

For some, despite their delight at being taken seriously, the unfamiliarity of the scene is almost too disorientating.

A blind runner despite winning a gold in the 10,000m confesses that for the first 800m or so the noise drove all thoughts of tactics from his head.

More importantly, he couldn't hear where other runners were, a vital factor for him in how to pace his race.

A sprinter holds up his hand just before the start as if to shield himself from the shrill cheers of thousands of schoolchildren.

Disability awareness

The presence of these children is part of the explanation.

The Paralympic organisers realised early that however well they ran the event it would be a damp squib if played out to three-quarters empty stadia.

Disability in its most obvious visible form is never more exposed than in sport

So for the past three years a massive campaign has been underway involving every school in Australia to suck them into the mysteries of the Paralympic movement.

Indeed, with the merest whiff of social engineering, the games have been used as the focus for a massive disability awareness campaign.

Fifty-thousand children have enjoyed government subsidised visits to the games.

But this alone does not account for the huge pull the games has had over the Australian public.

Huge public interest

On the night of the opening ceremony for instance, ABC, who transmitted the whole event live, achieved a 54% audience reach in Sydney, the highest for any programme or event in its history and ticket sales topped the million mark as the games began.

Once you've watched them it's easy enough to see the appeal of wheelchair racing or the extremely fast and combative form of basketball the athletes play.

However some of the sports are frankly esoteric, such as boccia, a form of bowls played by people with particularly severe disabilities and yet these were full too.

China's Junquan: He came fourth in the men's 50m freestyle

Back at the Novotel, when enough drink had been taken, somebody finally asked the inevitable but postponed question.

"Do they regard it as a freak show? You know, the modern equivalent of circuses?"

We didn't gasp, we'd all been wondering the same thing.

But if that is the reason it is being remarkably well concealed in an act of almost superhuman national conspiracy.

Celebrating difference

What few crass or insensitive comments I have heard have come from the press and broadcasters, not from the general public.

A prosthesis stands poolside during the competition

They seem to be accepting it in the jargon of the disability movement, as the celebration of difference.

The fact is that disability in its most obvious visible form is never more exposed than in sport.

Stripped for action on the track or in the pool, no attempt is being made to conceal or disguise a missing limb or an unusual shape.

Yet despite being at the swimming pool for several evenings, I can't remember hearing a gauche comment or even a gasp, just enormous cheers of admiration for the virtuosity of the athletes.

Indeed if anyone is guilty of failing to uphold the athletes' idea that this should be pure sport free of any hint of concession or patronage it is the sports administrators of the games who, almost without exception, are able-bodied.

Will to win

Louise Sauvage of Australia won gold in the women's 5000m T54 final

Some of the decisions at the games still suggest that there are those who still see the Paralympics in the way that it was originally conceived - as moral-boosting therapy rather than real sport.

The classic example was a race in which one of Australia's best known sportswomen, able-bodied or disabled, Louise Sauvage, came second to a Canadian wheelchair athlete.

But during the race, a collision well behind athletes in the medal positions occurred. Two competitors were forced out of the race and after a protest the race was ordered to be re-run.

It's highly unlikely such a decision would have been taken in the Oympics. Indeed when Zola Budd notoriously tripped Mary Decker-Slaney in the Los Angeles Olympics there was never any question of running the race again.

C'est la guerre, was the verdict. And that, reassuringly was the verdict of most of the public and the press in Sydney.

If disabled athletes want parity, the view went, then that means accepting that accidents will happen.

Parity preferred

This is not a sports day for five-year-olds. At the express wish of the athletes it's regarded as a blue-ribboned event and to be fair it was not Louise Sauvage's wish to overturn the decision.

In the end sanity and equality prevailed. The decision to re-run was overturned.

This incident and the emergence of drugs as a growing problem in disability as well as mainstream sport probably mean that the Paralympics probably have come of age.

While most Paralympic athletes almost certainly don't use drugs, the attitude of most of those I've talked to is that finally no-one can doubt that they are competing not because they're plucky or inspiring but because they want to win.