“Are you working or competing?” a colleague quipped when I told him I was going to Athens to cover the Paralympic Games. 

He needn’t have asked.

I was no athlete when I had two feet – and the landmine explosion that robbed me of one of them in Iraq last year didn’t miraculously turn me into the next Maurice Greene. Any hopes I may have had of making it into the Great Britain squad for Beijing in 2008 were finally extinguished once and for all when I met the American sprinter, Marlon Shirley. Shirley is the fastest amputee in the world and can run 100 metres in 10.97 seconds.

“What would I need to do if I wanted to match your times,” I asked him.

“Start with the 6 to 7 hours of training I do five or six days a week,” he replied.

Thanks for the advice, Marlon. I think I’ll stick to the day job. 

Surrounded by inspiring athletes like Marlon Shirley, one frustration emerged time and time again – the Cult of Tanni.

For most people in Britain, the Welsh wheelchair racer Tanni Grey-Thompson is the Paralympics.

The eleven-time Paralympic gold medallist has done more than any other person to bring disability sport into the mainstream.

The downside of her illustrious career is that she is the only disabled sportsperson most people can name. Of all the programme requests I received asking for an interview with a Paralympian, I’d say more than three quarters wanted to talk to Tanni. Perfectly understandable – but a crying shame when the Great Britain squad also boasted such engaging personalities and great “talkers” as pistol shooter Isabel Newstead, judoka Simon Jackson, horseman Lee Pearson and runner Danny Crates.

It’s up to us to promote the next generation of Paralympic heroes. 

From a gathering of 400 disabled athletes in Rome in 1960, the Paralympics has grown to become the second biggest sporting event in the world after the Olympics. Almost 4,000 athletes from more than 130 countries took part in the Athens Games. 

Their endeavours were covered by more than 3,000 journalists from almost 50 worldwide broadcasters, with one notable exception – the United States. 

During the Summer Olympics, NBC’s presence in Athens was vast, as the network tried to squeeze every dollar of coverage from the $800m it had paid for the US broadcast rights. 

During the Paralympics, the size of the deployment by all the American networks combined was -- precisely zero. 

No American broadcaster bought the rights to show the Games, meaning the only chance US viewers will get to see their elite disabled athletes in action will be a highlights package, to be shown on an obscure cable channel in mid November, almost two months after the Paralympics ended.  

For me, this omission in a country where 20% of the population has some form of disability is nothing short of scandalous. 

One of the first obstacles facing anyone covering the Paralympics for the first time is the alphabet soup of categories used to classify an athlete’s disability and make each event as fair as possible. Just as in boxing and weightlifting athletes are categorized by weight classes, at the Paralympics an athlete may be classed as, say, a T11 if they’re a visually impaired runner or an S8 if they’re a physically impaired swimmer. The system, though straightforward enough, can be confusing to an outsider – especially when you try to explain why it is that the third men’s 100m final of the day is about to take place!

The Paralympics seem to have a strange effect on even the most seasoned journalists. A number of the sportswriters I met in Athens chose to forego the “main” Olympics in order to report from the Paralympics instead. Having covered both events this Summer it’s easy for me to see why. British swimmers Sascha Kindred and Nyree Lewis, South African runner Oscar Pistorius and Canadian wheelchair racer Chantal Petitclerc may not be as well-known (or as well-paid) as their able-bodied compatriots, but their performances will go down as some of my most memorable sporting moments from Athens. 

Now, where are my training shoes?