Proud parents' Paralympics diary

After months of preparation, perspiration and anticipation we have finally arrived in Beijing to watch Nathan compete in his first summer Paralympic Games.

Having arrived at 9.30 Monday morning, we checked into our hotel which is just a short walk away from the Birds Nest Stadium, anticipating a couple of hours relaxation to get over our nine-and-a-half hour flight.

But we were immediately thrown into the hunt for event tickets because Nathan's competition had been re-scheduled again!

We were soon in a mad dash through jammed city streets in a taxi to collect pre-booked tickets and hopefully acquire tickets for the shot putt event the following morning.

Luckily we were successful in our quest for the required tickets and joyfully returned to our hotel back through the now even more heavily congested streets of Beijing city to meet up with Nathan.

When Nathan arrived at our hotel he was over the moon to say the least as he had also obtained tickets, and now we had more tickets than we could shake a stick at - happy happy happy!

Nathan, at 20, is the youngest competitor and looks so small compared to these giants of men Helen Stephens

We then spent a couple of relaxing hours catching up on Nathan's first week in Beijing. He was very impressed with the Paralympic village.

"The size of Cardiff" were his words! He stated that his training was going well, he felt good and was looking forward to the start of competition the following morning.

After a bite to eat he headed off back to the village, and we had a couple of hours to kill before we hit the sack so we spent the time checking out the hotel facilities, nice pool and numerous restaurants. We also caught up with friends who had been here for a few days. Time for bed.

Tuesday morning dawns, the alarm wakes us at 5.30am and we open the curtains to a typical Welsh summer - rain, rain and more rain.

We head off for our first experience of the Birds Nest Stadium and through the gloom and misty rain we turned the corner and this spectacular structure appeared before our eyes. It certainly fulfilled our expectations.

Having watched the Olympics on TV back home, we were now actually here.

We picked our seats carefully for the best possible view of the shot putt event and settled down to wait the start of competition.

As the start time approached we were slowly but surly engulfed by a sea of Chinese faces, who only seemed to want their photos taken, all of them!

The Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing is even more spectacular at night

Our son and his fellow 13 competitors entered the field of play to start their competition. Nathan, at 20, is the youngest competitor and looks so small compared to these giants of men. The Russian is 6ft 8in and built, as Bill McClaren once said, like a brick shed.

This competition is a mix class composing of classes F57, Nathan's class and F58 which is for athletes with less of a disability. The final outcome of the event is worked on a points system relative to the class world record.

Out of the 14 athletes Nathan is the ONLY double leg amputee.

After the first round of three throws the Russian had broken the F58 world record by a good margin giving him the most points and putting him in gold medal position.

The South African F57 record holder was ecstatic to get the new Paralympic record only for it to be broken by the Jordanian with a new F57 world record of 14.26m.

Nathan made it through to the final eight with a very creditable 12.57m, and was very pleased to get his first Paralympic event under his belt.

Now we have a couple of days for sight-seeing before Nathan's discus event on Saturday morning.