2004 Summer Paralympics
multi-parasport event in Athens, Greece
The 2004 Summer Paralympics (Greek: Θερινοί Παραολυμπιακοί Αγώνες 2004), the 12th Summer Paralympic Games, were a major international multi-sport event for athletes with disabilities governed by the International Paralympic Committee, held in Athens, Greece, from 17 to 28 September 2004. 3,749 athletes (2,600 Men and 1,149 Women) from 135 countries participated. During these games 304 World Records were broken with 448 Paralympic Games Records being broken across 19 different sports. 8,863 volunteers worked along the Organizing Committee.
Four new events were introduced to the Paralympics in Athens; 5-a-side football for the blind, quads wheelchair tennis, and women's competitions in judo and sitting volleyball. Following a scandal at the 2000 Summer Paralympics, in which the Spanish intellectually-disabled basketball team was stripped of their gold medal after it was found that multiple players had not met the eligibility requirements, ID-class events were suspended.
It was also the last time that the old Paralympic symbol was used. The new Paralympic symbol was introduced in 2006.
Host City Bid Process
Athens was chosen as the host city during the 106th IOC Session held in Lausanne, Switzerland on 5 September 1997. The Greek capital had lost its bid to organize the 1996 Summer Olympics to the American city of Atlanta nearly seven years before, during the 96th IOC Session in Tokyo, Japan on 18 September 1990.
“2004 Summer Paralympics” enters the record as multi-parasport event in Athens, Greece. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Summer, Paralympics and multi-parasport can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q840654. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2000, 2006 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “2004 Summer Paralympics” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.