Going for glory in London

Tomorrow evening, the opening ceremony for the 2012 Paralympics will serve as the world’s portal to over 4,000 athletes which Channel 4, the host country’s broadcaster, have been calling superhumans in their clever, pre-Games advertising campaign.

Forty-nine of them will be Irish and some of them you will know. Like Jason Smyth and Michael McKillop, our gold medal winners in athletics in Beijing four years ago. Or Mark Rohan, the reigning World Handcycling Time Trial and Road Race world champion.

In all, five of those wearing green over the next two weeks will be carrying the title of reigning world champion while only injury prevented double Paralympic champion and world record holder Smyth making it a round half-dozen.

Yet the vast majority have travelled to London as unknowns beyond their local communities. Elite sportsmen and women who, if they ever merit a second glance on our streets, probably do so because of their disabilities rather than their sporting prowess.

That can all change in the English capital.

Like their Olympic predecessors, it is not so much a question of whether or not Team Ireland will return with medals but rather how many. And yet, like their able-bodied counterparts, there will be other means of measuring success.

Take Roy Guerin. A housing officer with Kerry County Council, married and a father of two. The man from Kilflynn has been lifting weights for 20 years but it is only in the last two that he turned to the sport competitively after a previous life as a Paralympic wheelchair racer.

After appearances on the track in Atlanta in 1996 and Beijing in 2008, the 37-year is now turning his attention to the ExCel Arena where he will become the first Irish Paralympic powerlifter since Rome in 1960 when he competes in the 67.5kg class.

“It has been a hard road to get to this point and, at the end of the day, what will be will be,” said Guerin, who has spina bifida.

“It is just a matter of getting to the competition phase now, getting there and doing the business.”

Guerin’s transition has proved remarkably successful thus far given such a truncated competitive CV. He won gold in the 2011 British Nationals in the 75kg class and silver in the same event a year later but this time in the 67.5kg class.

“I am only at this two years so what I am after is a PB out here. Maybe in four years’ time I might be looking at medals but this is about learning, getting the experience of competing in a competition of the highest standard.

“The transition (from athletics) was relatively okay,” he added. “I still have an awful lot to learn about powerlifting, there is no point in me saying otherwise. There is a long road still ahead of me with this sport.

“In any sport, to reach the top of it you are talking about 10 years. Whether I stay at it for that length of time or not, I don’t know. We will see how this goes and I will worry about ten years’ time after London.”