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The wheelchair racer Joshua George will be competing in the 2012 Paralympic Games in London and writing for the 2012 London blog.

LONDON — Just before the start of each race the crowd goes silent. Eighty thousand people stop cheering and begin waiting, anticipating the race to come. The sound of the gun not only causes the competitors to explode off the line, but the crowd to erupt in sound as well.

This is how it happens for every race, and this is how it happened for my 800-meter final, my third event and second chance at the podium in the Paralympic Games. As I exploded around the first bend I’m sure the volume of the crowd noise began to increase, though it was nothing more than white noise in the periphery of my thoughts.

“Get out, get out!” I screamed to myself, hearing nothing more than the sound of my gloved hands on the push rims of my racing chair. I flew out of the first turn and lengthened my stroke as I hit the backstretch, my hands shooting off the bottoms of the push rims, stretching high above my back and pouncing back toward the rim. The track was empty ahead of me and I knew my competitors were scrambling behind me to fall in my draft.

I told myself before the race that whatever happened was going to happen from the front. In wheelchair racing, much like cycling, the lead man in a pack is at a disadvantage. While they are cutting through the wind the athletes in the back take advantage of the slipstream created by the lead and are able to maintain the same speeds with much less effort. This technique is called drafting.

In a perfect wheelchair race you want to sit in second or third place, taking full advantage of the draft from the lead racer while insuring that you don’t get boxed in on the outside. At some point in the final 400 meters you begin your kick, using all the energy you saved in the draft to sling yourself around the chairs ahead of you and embark in an all-out sprint to the finish. In the perfect race you are the first person to cross the finish line.

My racing to this point had been anything but perfect. I quickly got my head back after my 400-meter debacle, but despite hitting some good speeds in my 1,500-meter semifinal, I allowed myself to be ushered to the back just before the final kick and failed to make the final, as all four racers ahead of me accelerated at the same pace and hit the same top speeds in the final lap. I ran fast, but just as fast as all four ahead of me. We finished in the same arrangement that we entered the final lap. Read more…