A total of 1,100 athletes - 740 male and 360 female - will compete in 170 medal events starting on August 30 and finishing on September 9 with the marathon which finishes in front of Buckingham Palace on The Mall.

China, who finished top overall at last year's IPC Athletics World Championships in Christchurch with a total of 58 medals, including 21 gold, will have the biggest delegation after it was awarded 80 slots, the maximum number a National Paralympic Committee (NPC) could be awarded.

This is followed by the United States with 54 slots, Russia 53, whilst host nation Britain, who won 38 medals in Christchurch, including 12 gold, has been granted 52 slots.

"It shows the growing strength and depth of the sport that a record 101 National Paralympic Committees will have athletes competing in track and field events at London 2012," said Ed Warner, the chairman of the IPC Athletics Sport Technical Committee.

"This is further underlined by the fact that we had 1,782 athletes who had achieved the A-qualification standard for the Games, despite us only having 1,100 slots available.

"As a result we had to rely on the London 2012 Paralympic Games Qualification Guide, published in January 2010, to determine how many slots each country received."


The first 239 slots, comprising 146 male and 93 female, for London were allocated to NPCs whose athletes had placed first or second in any of the individual medal events on the London 2012 programme at the 2011 World Championships.

A further 830 slots were allocated via the A-qualification standard allocation method which is based on results from IPC recognised competitions which took place between December 1, 2010, and May 20, 2012.

Finally, the remaining 31 slots have been reserved for bipartite invitation qualification slots, places awarded to top athletes who have not had the chance to qualify for London 2012, mostly from emerging nations.

So far there have been more than 200 applications for these slots ahead of the deadline on Monday (June 4).

Of the 170 track medal events in London, there are 103 for male athletes and 67 for females.

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