The Paralympic games have had an overwhelmingly brilliant response in London.
The Opening Ceremony seemed to go down well, and despite Channel 4's online video player not working for anyone I know, Clare Balding and the people of the UK (and the Internet) have been watching, cheering, and crying along with our Superhumans.
The Paralympics are doing a fantastic scheme with the Day Pass tickets, where you can attend events (excluding swimming, cycling and athletics) if they have space. There are very clear signs posted and frequent announcements saying which venues, such as the Copperbox or the Riverbank Arena, have Day Pass tickets available.
Luckily, the Basketball Arena still had spaces left at the start of the USA vs China women's wheelchair basketball game yesterday, so I was able to get a fantastic seat to watch what would turn out to be one of the most exciting sporting events of my life.
The Differences
Watching a Paralympic sport is different than watching an Olympic sport as towards the beginning, you're trying to figure out how it all works. Or, as Jimmy Carr put it on Channel 4's The Last Leg, you see the disability. You're looking at the blades, or in the case of yesterday's game, the wheelchairs, fascinated. How are they going to do this? What is this game going to look like?
And then, the whistle blows, and the Paralympians are speeding down the court. You hear the familiar shouts and cheers of sport, the cries of frustration, the elated shouts from the crowd when someone scores.
Halfway through the first quarter of yesterday's game, the athletes' wheelchairs suddenly disappeared to me. I truly saw the athletes, not the chairs. They had just become a part of the game. The girls would crash into each other, sometimes with opponents wheels locking together. Sometimes they were knocked over, and the crowd cheered encouragingly when they were upright again.
In the midst of the competition, you're yelling and just as involved in the game as you would any other sport, but it's more exciting simply because it's the bloody Paralympics, and everyone is excited to be there.
The Game
The athletes on either team, both the US and China, were incredibly fierce. They fouled each other repeatedly, they crashed into each other at full speed in the name of defense.
This game was particularly amazing as the US were behind China by at least eight points most of the game, at one point it was around 20 points. Every once and a while the US would manage to make it a five point game, maybe a three point game, and then China would score about six points and you'd start to wonder if they could ever bring it back.
The game ended in overtime, with the US up by three points - 65 to 68, mostly thanks to the incredible talent of Rebecca Murray who carried her team most of the game, scoring an incredible 30 points all on her own.
As I left the Basketball Arena, my hands were numb from clapping. My voice was hoarse from screaming. And my nerves were shot from the pure emotion that filled the arena - mind you, an arena mostly filled with British people, who got behind two teams not of their own nationality.
If that's not what you want from a sporting event, I don't know what is.
A huge thank you to British Airways for making this possible.