Welcome to the fastest-growing event in world sport, a multi-sport competition between athletes of extraordinary talent, courage and determination who will hold a cumulative TV audience of four billion people across the globe spellbound this summer when they perform in Rio de Janeiro.
Time to marvel once again, then, at the wonders of the Paralympic Games.
It is hard to credit that it was only three generations ago in 1948 that this burgeoning phenomenon all started with just 14 men and two women shooting arrows at a target from a wheelchair, cheered on only by a small bunch of enthusiastic spectators and quite invisible to the public beyond the English hospital grounds where the quaint fete took place.
Yet when it rolls up in Brazil this summer, the event which had begun as those 1948 Stoke Mandeville Games, a novel competition for injured ex-servicemen at a spinal injuries unit who had taken up wheelchair archery to boost their rehabilitation, will have mushroomed into a spectacular festival featuring 4,350 athletes in 22 different sports from more than 160 countries.
No sports event on the planet has been transformed so completely, so hugely or so swiftly. None, too, is still evolving as quickly to the point where officials of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) believe their showpiece could eventually overtake the football World Cup as the world's second-biggest sporting event in terms of ticket sales behind only the Olympics.
Talk about humble, primitive beginnings. In 1960, when the first Paralympics were held in Rome, Britain's first-ever gold medallist Margaret Maughan still smiles at the memory of the almost comical operation needed just to get the 70-strong team hoisted up to the aircraft doors in a cage on a fork-lift truck to fly them to their venue.
Once in Italy, Roman soldiers then had to carry athletes over their shoulders just to get them to their rooms, so ill-equipped was the Games to house the athletes. As for Margaret, she didn't even know she had won her archery competition because nobody had told her her scores and she only discovered the news when officials came looking for her and had to carry her and her hefty wheelchair off the coach to the medal ceremony!
It all seems an unreal world away from the slick spectacular planned for 2016, which will showcase state-of-the-art facilities, see full-time athletes taking advantage of space age-designed equipment like £2,000 lightweight racing wheelchairs and watch a standard of record-breaking sport that would have seemed inconceivable half-a-century ago.
"We know Rio 2016 will be the most widely broadcast Paralympics in history," enthuses Sir Philip Craven, the President of the IPC, noting that between 120 and 150 nations will screen the event this year compared to 100 in the last edition in London 2012. For the first time, America will be on board for major coverage too.
This explosion of interest, believes Craven, a former Paralympian himself in three different sports, is down to the dramatically improving performances of para-athletes, the majority of whom now benefit from high-performance training programmes on a par with their Olympic counterparts.
"To give you one example," he says, "at the Atlanta '96 Paralympic Games, the men's 100 metres T44 for below-knee leg amputees was won in a world record 11.36 seconds. At Rio 2016, the US world champion Richard Browne is fully confident he can lower his own world record of 10.61 seconds to below 10.5.
"To knock nearly one second off a 100m world record in 20 years is a staggering achievement and highlights that para-athletes are getting faster, stronger and more agile all the time." Indeed, there are those who are firm believers that in 25 years the fastest man in the world could well be a Paralympian.
And with the stellar performances comes the making of stars. One survey showed that less than one per cent of the British population could name a Paralympian before the 2012 Games whereas afterwards 31 per cent of the population could name at least five.
"I can promise you a life-changing experience that will make you re-evaluate what you believe is humanly possible." Sir Philip Craven, President of the International Paralympic Committee
Paralympians, like BP ambassadors, have a profile like never before. Athletes like Marlou van Rhijn, the Dutch sprinter now famed globally as 'the Blade Babe' have become role models. Others, like Trinidadian swimmer Shanntol Ince have turned into national heroes. Some, like US wheelchair racing legend Tatyana McFadden have been social trailblazers as well as the rarest of sporting champions.
All of which has led to the increasing realisation that no sporting event actually does more to break down walls of prejudice and discrimination and to change ill-informed, deep-rooted views in society regarding disability than this event.
"We are the world's number one sporting event for driving social inclusion and that's a position we want to cement further in Rio," Craven explained recently in a speech in Brazil.
"For many Brazilians, Rio 2016 will be their first experience of Paralympic sport and will be uncertain of what to expect. I can promise you a life-changing experience that will make you re-evaluate what you believe is humanly possible.
"You will see sport like never before and witness some of the best athletic performances ever delivered."
This is hard to dispute - and so is the reality that Paralympians are now constantly challenging and changing perceptions of sport and of disabilities.
A third of Britons questioned after 2012 said they'd altered their attitude towards people with a disability because of the Games. That's 20 million people at a stroke.
Four years earlier, following the Beijing Games, a Chinese government official said the perception of a person with a disability had changed there from wretched street beggar to a brilliant footballer, shooter or long jumper. There's been compelling evidence too that thousands of people with a disability have been able to find jobs more easily because Chinese employers had changed their outlook.
Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that the Paralympics doesn't still have a long, hard road to travel before it helps eradicate the prejudice, ignorance and even hostility towards people with disabilities.
There is something about this event which should give everyone hope. Craven thinks everything changed in 1992 in the Barcelona edition when a brilliant organising committee turned the Games into a marketable proposition for the first time, with free tickets being handed out and more than a million people flocking to watch the action.
It was there that Dr Stephen Hawking, the great physicist and cosmologist who is paralysed from motor neurone disease, struck a cord by telling the world at the opening ceremony: "Each one has within us the spark of fire, a creative touch."
That energy burning within its incredible competitors is the fuel that makes these Games great, that is pushing the event into uncharted territory. Rio will be the biggest yet but Tokyo 2020, with the commercial backing and sponsorships already in place, will dwarf it further. The future of the Paralympian movement, says Craven, could be exhilarating.
At the Olympic Games, the motto is 'citius, altius, fortius' but while Paralympians too become ever 'faster, higher, stronger' at each edition, there is something else that sets their Games apart. It's almost indefinable, a soaring feeling at the event's heart which the Paralympics' own motto 'Spirit in Motion' somehow captures so well.
It was as Craven told the world from the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing at the start of the 2008 Games: "Above all, when we come together we will be part of a creation of an almost touchable and definitely breathable, distinctive energy source which is at the heart of the Paralympic movement - and it's what we call the Paralympic spirit.
"And once it gets hold, you can never let it go. It will last you a lifetime."
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