Paralympics: Relentlessly warm, the weather has not failed the Paralympics since the torch was lit in the northern outskirts of Athens last Friday. Despite that the crowds have failed to fill the Olympic Stadium as they did in Sydney four years ago and the morning sessions, particularly, can be lonely vigils for the athletes.

Yesterday at 9 a.m. Ireland's Lisa Callaghan exceeded her expectations and delighted the Irish team when she threw her javelin 24.12 metres, breaking the world record. For the small group of Irish supporters who were there to support the 21-year-old from Co Meath, they might have reasonably believed their girl was in the medals. Her throw was the second longest in the field but she came fifth in the F35-38 event and did not make it to the podium.

So too was Australian joy cut short by the blazers with the calculators, when Karen Webb launched her javelin 28.47 metres to also break the world record, scatter the field and beat the rest of her opponents by four metres.

The Australian athlete finished the competition in fourth place with her effort, the gold medal slipping away to Poland with a throw of 23.24 metres, the silver medal to the Czech Republic with 22.70 metres and the bronze to South Africa with 21.94 metres.

The F35-38 classification groups athletes with cerebral palsy together. It is an open class in which athletes with varying ranges of disability compete against each other. To make that unequal competition viable and fair, classification tables are needed to convert the throws into points and points into medals.

Roughly speaking, the length of the throw combined with the disability factor equals the score. The end result is that athletes throw world records and still miss out on medals to athletes who don't throw within four metres of them.

It's the accessibility of sport that generally allows a connection to take place between spectator and athlete. The understanding of it, the appreciation of the skills, its simplicity. Connection is everything, while the nature of the sport itself is almost irrelevant. Hurling is the best sport in the world in Kilkenny and Cork. It is not in Boston or Havana. In New Zealand rugby does it. Soccer is the beautiful game, an opiate for everyone, the Olympics a kind of brash beauty pageant every four years, the Miss Universe of the sports firmament.

Where the Paralympics fit in is difficult to say. It boasts now of being the second biggest sports event in the world, next to the Olympic Summer Games. That giganticism occasionally makes it inaccessible, the classes for the athletes and the conversion tables confusing and sometimes open to question. No doubt classification is needed and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) rigorously controls it. It has to. And the IPC have also sanctioned the participation of athletes with an intellectual disability in an effort to try to control that too, and keep the integrity of the Games intact.

In 2000, 11 of the 12 players on the Spanish basketball team competed with no disability at all, so classification is a sensitive and important issue to get right.

There are at least 94 classes of athlete spread over 20 sports in Athens. In Callaghan's event, the F35-38 javelin brings together those with normal static balance, who may have sufficient function to run on the track, to those athletes with uncontrollable muscular spasms and who do not have the capability to remain still. It is a vastly varying group.

The classification is an ongoing process and the classes are determined by a number of ways, including physical and technical assessment, and observation both in and out of competition. The natural competitive instinct ensures that many athletes will try to get a classification that benefits him or her when it comes to competition time.

There are always stories going around.

The athlete, who despite being seriously visually impaired was unerringly able to hit his mark in the run up to the long jump and always stayed on course.

In track and field alone there are 28 different classes ranging from wheelchair athletes, who provide some of the most dramatic entertainment at the Games, to the Kenyan 10,000 metres T11 winner who ran the distance in a world record 31:37.25 seconds.

But it is sometimes uneasy relationship between those who train for years and get nothing and those who fall into medals effortlessly. Callaghan falls into one group, American April Homes the other. Holmes, who lost her leg in a train accident a few years ago, won the bronze medal in the long jump despite only ever long jumping twice in her life before.

Once was at an indoor meet in May, where she took only two jumps to meet qualifying standard and the second time in Monday's final. Like Callaghan's javelin throw, that doesn't make competitive sense but hinders the Paralympics, makes them less accessible, less attractive.