A sport invented for quadriplegic athletes in Canada in the 1970s, murderball makes ice hockey look positively timid. Contact is allowed, even tactically encouraged. If a wheelchair is damaged, the team only has 60 seconds in which to repair it, or one crucial player is out of the game. While soccer players have a tendency to collapse into the fetal position at the hint of physical contact, wheelchair rugby players relish the opportunity for full-on collisions. Getting tipped over in your chair is to be expected, as are crushed fingers and bloody noses.

(PHOTOS: Highlights from the Paralympics)

The sport is being drummed up as the main event of this Paralympics, with many British papers relishing the opportunity to play on the name: “Murderball teams prepare for slaughter” runs the headline from the Independent. The Guardian went with “It’s murder out there” following the first day of action, including an image of GB star David Anthony, sporting a striking blue mohawk roaring at teammate Aaron Phipps.

Still a relatively young sport, its popularity was fuelled by the 2005 Oscar nominated documentary Murderball, and tickets for the 2012 games sold out in just three days. Two of the U.S. players who were featured in the documentary still play for the team, the defending champions and favorites for this year’s crown along with the likes of Canada and Australia.  They proved their worth with a 56-44 win over GB in the opener.

Despite its formal name, the game itself is an amalgamation of sports such as basketball, hockey and rugby. And while the brutality of it is often played up in the press, there are many cerebral, tactical aspects the game that make it such a rewarding spectator sport.

(MORE: Richard Corliss Reviews Murderball)

Many fans, in fact, liken it to chess, and it’s easy to see why: the players are in constant dialogue with each other as they attempt to score over the four, eight minute quarters of the game. Once a team has possession, they must score by carrying the ball over the end line within 40 seconds, or hand over possession to the opponent.

What adds to the drama, and allows teams to intercept the ball, is the requirement for players to pass or dribble the ball to their teammates within ten seconds. Failure to do so again means a change of possession. And while the game features some of the most disabled athletes at the Paralympics – players must have functional impairments to both their upper and lower limbs to be eligible – their speed and agility as they zoom across the regulation size basketball court can make it hard for spectators to keep up with the action.

The specially designed wheelchairs, which can cost nearly $8,000 each, are adapted differently for offensive and defensive players. They all come with anti-tip devices, attached to the back of the chair to make sure that players do not fall over easily. Despite this, broken bones are common to the game. Great Britain’s captain Steve Brown once broke six ribs and his sternum following a tackle. But many of these players have spinal cord injuries, and as a result, many claim that it makes them fearless.

(MORE: Tracing the Paralympics’ British Roots)

Surprisingly breaking a bone is one of the lesser dangers players watch out for in the sport. Over-heating is much more of an immediate concern. One of the complications of spinal cord injuries is that the body’s ability to sweat below the level of the injury is diminished. Breaks between rounds are therefore crucial in allowing players to cool down.

Another defining feature of the sport is that it is not just for men of steel: it’s a mixed gender game. Still, despite this openness, there are only two women in the entire event across the eight teams. Kylie Grimes, of Team GB, is one of them. Speaking after the game against the U.S. to the Times of London, she said: “They treat me the same, that’s how it should be,” and then added, “it would be nice to see more women.”

Perhaps the spotlight on the game in London can attract more. Certainly the high-octane opening games from Wednesday showed the commitment from all players to put on a show. Medal hopefuls will need to have stamina though: the final takes place on Sunday and to reach it, teams will have to play – and dominate – over five consecutive days.

MORE: India’s Golden Girls: How Sports and the Olympics Can Uplift Women

This humble event, organized by a neurosurgeon named Dr. Ludwig Guttmann to lift his patients’ spirits, marked the beginning of the Paralympic movement. Sixty-four years later, the Paralympics has become the second largest sporting competition in the world behind the Olympics, drawing 4,200 athletes from 147 nations to compete in London for the 2012 Games.

Given Stoke Mandeville’s historical importance in the birth of the Paralympics, Olympic planners made clear the village would play a part in the London 2012 celebrations (one of this year’s Olympic mascots, a cuddly blue and grey cyclops, is even named after the town). But as the Summer Games drew closer, local officials began to worry about how the village’s Paralympic history would be presented. New hospital buildings now sit on the lawn where those first competitors gathered in 1948, and all that is left of Guttmann’s spinal unit are a few rusty white dormitory huts that now store sporting equipment. “We realized that people might come to Stoke Mandeville and try and see where it started,” says Ruth Page, project manager of the Mandeville Legacy, a government-funded project to chart the history of the Paralympics. “The thing is, there’s really nothing here.”

(PHOTOS: Highlights from the 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremonies)

While there wasn’t any money to create a Paralympic museum at Stoke Mandeville, funding was available to create an exhibition at the town’s stadium for interested visitors. This meant retrieving dusty jumbled old photographs and historical papers stored in the archives of three local charities. “They really had no idea what they held,” says Page, who worked with Buckinghamshire Country Council senior archivist Laura Cotton to sift through the materials.

The collection, enlivened by stories and artifacts collected from past Paralympians, forms the basis of ‘Path to the Paralympic Games’ at the Stoke Mandeville Stadium, on show until Sept. 16. It’s a history of how one man’s vision and determination continues to change lives long after his death. Guttmann, whom his patients simply called “Poppa,” was a Jewish doctor who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to Oxford on the eve of World War Two. He was asked by the British government to lead the National Spinal Injury Centre in Stoke Mandeville, which opened in 1944 and focused on treating the horrific injuries suffered by Britain’s young men during the war. At the time, not many doctors were eager to care for paraplegic young vets. “When you speak to some of the old nurses, nobody wanted to work on Spinal Unit,” says Cotton. “It was a death sentence. Young men just came and died, slowly and horribly.” But Guttmann agreed, and set about transforming not only the way paralysis was treated, but instilling hope in his patients.

Guttmann encouraged members of the ward to keep busy by woodworking, mending watches and putting on plays and pantomimes. But he saw sport as the most rewarding of all activities for those confined to a wheelchair. As early as 1949, he already had ambitions to expand the Stoke Mandeville Games, as they were then called, into an international sporting competition on a par with the Olympics.

(MORE: 20 Paralympic Athletes to Watch at London 2012)

The exhibition traces the development of the games from their informal beginnings in the ’40s to their international expansion in subsequent decades. Early photos show archers in wheelchairs sitting proudly in front of their targets and Guttmann smiling and clutching the hands of Canadian athletes as they arrived at Heathrow Airport in 1954. By the end of the 1950s, participants were coming in from all five continents and the International Olympic Committee has offered its first hints of qualified support.

The exhibit’s snippets from archival material reveal the charm and goodwill of the early Games. At the 1960 Games in Rome, the accommodations were not wheelchair friendly, and competitors had to be hoisted up and down the stairs by Italian volunteers. Not all the male athletes enjoyed this, but some of the ladies did. “We girls thought it was rather nice when you were tilted back in your chair, and you met a pair of beautiful brown eyes and a voice saying ‘buongiorno.’” wrote participant Janet Laughton in a newsletter produced for the Games. At Tokyo in 1964, the winner of the 60m wheelchair dash was presented with a geisha figurine clad in a silk kimono. British athletes with disabilities also received a warm welcome home – an athlete’s souvenir guide to No. 10 Downing Street from a 1964 reception is signed by several dignitaries including the Prime Minister himself, Harold Wilson.

(MORE: Blind Faith: How Kenyan Paralympian Henry Wanyoike Triumphed)

Perhaps most evocative, however, are the pieces of clothing and sporting equipment used by the athletes themselves. There is a hunter green blazer and matching cap — a uniform British athletes recycled for each Games during the 1960s. “They said they were really horrible to wear, because they were of really itchy material,” says Cotton. Nearby hangs a battered red table tennis paddle used by Tommy Taylor, who came to Stoke Mandeville to be treated by Dr. Guttmann after an accident in 1956. Despite being severely paralyzed, Taylor went on to win 16 medals across five sports, ten of them gold. His speciality was table tennis, however, and his paddle still shows how he adapted to his use: gauze padding covered the handle with a large rubber band to attach it to his hand.

Collecting living Paralympians’ stories is also one of the priorities of the Mandeville Legacy project. None of the participants in the first 1948 Games are alive, but patients of Dr. Guttmann’s from the 1950s who went on to compete in the Paralympics still survive. “It’s important for us to capture different people’s voices and memories,” says Cotton, “because they are disappearing all the time.”

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Then he lost.

It was by all accounts a stunning upset: Pistorius was beaten by 0.07 seconds by another double amputee, Brazil’s Alan Oliveira. “We are not running in a fair race here,” Pistorius told the U.K.’s Channel 4 after the race, complaining about International Paralympic Committee (IPC) regulations that allowed his competitor to artificially lengthen his blades — and thus, his stride. “I’m not taking away from Alan’s performance but … his knee heights are 4 in. higher than they should be.” He later apologized for his outburst, but does “believe that there is an issue here.” In his statement, Pistorius did concede that “I accept that raising these concerns immediately as I stepped off the track was wrong. That was Alan’s moment, and I would like to put on record the respect I have for him.”

(PHOTOS: Oscar Pistorius’ Historic Race)

While Pistorius’ inclusion in the 2012 London Olympics was seen as a transformative moment, his defeat in the 200 m is a reminder that he’s not the only talented Paralympian out there — and that others could eventually not only qualify for the Olympics but someday go on to win. Recent developments in prosthetics have opened the door to the possibility that “Paralympic athletes could one day run faster than Usain Bolt,” as David James of the Centre for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University told the Associated Press.

Yet the focus on such developments neglects the historically fluid line between athletes and “disabled” athletes (a term that the IPC president, Philip Craven, has said he wishes to do away with). Athletes with disabilities have competed in the Olympics since the early days of the modern Games, and many have competed in both the Olympics and Paralympics.

German-born U.S. gymnast George Eyser competed in the 1904 St. Louis games with a wooden left leg, a replacement for the one he lost after being run over by a train as a child. He won gold in three events — including in the vault and the 25-ft. rope climb — as well as two silvers and a bronze.

(PHOTOS: Highlights from the 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony)

Hungarian water-polo player Oliver Halassy, who also had a leg amputated, competed in three Olympic Games from 1928 through 1936.

Even after the creation of the Paralympic Games for disabled athletes in 1948, athletes with disabilities have competed in the Olympics. Partially deaf swimmer Jeff Float competed with the U.S. team in the 4 x 200-m relay in the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. As he extended his team’s lead in the third leg of the race that they went on to win, the roar of the home crowd was so loud that he was able to hear it for the first time.

Marla Runyan, who is legally blind, dominated the track-and-field events at the 1992 and 1996 Paralympics, taking gold in the 100 m and long jump. She then became an Olympian, competing in the 1,500 m during the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

(MORE: Oscar Pistorius: The ‘Blade Runner’ Makes Olympic History)

South African long-distance swimmer Natalie du Toit lost her leg in a car accident at age 17, and placed 16th in the 10-km swim in 2008 in the Beijing Olympics. Natalia Partyka also competed in both the 2008 Olympics and Paralympics, and is doing so again this year. The Polish table-tennis player was born without a right hand and forearm. She has yet to medal at either events, having just missed the quarterfinals in the 2012 Olympic women’s singles.

While only a handful of athletes are making this transition, the fact that there are Paralympians out there who are able to qualify and compete in the Olympics suggests the possibility for bigger changes to come in the future. Craven, the IPC president, suggested to the BBC in May that the Paralympics and Olympics could someday merge into one event.

As for Pistorius, he’ll have other chances for gold: he’s competing in the 4 x 100-m relay, the 100-m and the 400-m events later this week. But his loss on Sunday to Oliveira is a reminder that he’s not the only elite Paralympian on the track — and that there are plenty more on his heels.

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This year, however, Davies will be one of 120 in this category competing in three sports: swimming, table tennis and athletics (in the 1500m, shot put and long jump). It’s the first time in 12 years that the mentally-challenged have been included in the paralympics, and the road back to the Games for these competitors was no easy one.

(MORE: 20 Paralympic Athletes to Watch at London 2012)

The athletes first competed in the Games in 1996, when the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) added ‘intellectual impairment’ alongside its physical disability categories. In 2000, however, the category fell prey to one of the most brazen acts of cheating in sports history. At the Sydney Games, a Spanish basketball team won gold in the intellectually-disabled category, with ten of its members pretending to have a mental handicap. The deception, revealed after the Games by an undercover Spanish journalist who infiltrated the team as one of its secret able-bodied players, shocked the Paralympic community. The Spanish athletes were stripped of their medals and, in a blow to athletes with intellectual disabilities around the world, the category was eliminated altogether from the Paralympics.  Since then, an initiative launched by the IPC and the International Federation for  Sport for Para-athletes with an Intellectual Disability (INAS) has set out to find a way of tightening up the eligibility process, and making sure what happened in Sydney would never be repeated.

That meant, first and foremost, making it harder to circumvent controls on competitors. “In 2000, the assessment was a review of the medical information, and that was it,” says Peter Van de Vliet, the medical and scientific director for the International Paralympic Committee. “Someone looked at the files and said, okay, you have a declaration from a psychologist, from a special school, a medical doctor, that all confirm that you have an intellectual impairment. Off you go.” This left the door open for everything from cheating to simple negligence to pollute the process. Now, athletes must submit specific IQ tests, show that their condition affects their ability to perform day-to-day tasks and prove that they’ve had the impairment since before the age of 18. That information, called primary evidence, is then assessed by a panel of independent psychology experts.

If athletes pass this criteria, then they must show that their impairment actually hurts their skill at a specific sport. The modification put requirements for athletes with intellectual impairments in line with other Paralympic athletes, whose disabilities quite visibly keep them from running, throwing and swimming as well as able-bodied athletes. In both 1996 and 2000, by contrast, officials had wrongly assumed that intellectual disabilities always negatively affected an athlete’s sporting abilities. When it comes to table tennis, says Van de Vliet, some on the autistic spectrum have no disability whatsoever. “They are equally good, I would say, as any Chinese player who is at the Olympics.”

To test their sport-specific abilities, candidates are first assessed on overall ‘sports intelligence’ which includes reaction time, memory, concentration and spatial perception. Athletes take computer and paper tests, repeating sequences of blocks and copying 3D cube patterns. Potential Paralympians must score below the level of an able-bodied athlete to continue.

Next come the sport-specific tests. For table tennis, this involves returning a serve from a ‘table tennis robot’ to a specific spot. Athletes get several chances to hit the target with the ball. “We know, with the able-bodied, that the second ball has increased degree of accuracy to the target,” says Van de Vliet, who was involved as a researcher with the development of the test. “This does not seem to be the case with intellectually impaired athletes. There’s no learning from that experience.”

(MORE: Blind Faith: How Kenyan Paralympian Henry Wanyoike Triumphed)

Sports scientists test for the same learning difficulty when it comes to the long jump. “We look at the ability of an individual at certain set distances to anticipate for a take off point. We know from experience that able-bodied individuals learn from the first attempt,” says Van de Vliet. “An individual with an intellectual impairment does not.”

Athletes with intellectual impairment also struggle with tactics and pacing, which is why those applying to run in the 1500m must show that they find those skills difficult. “We set up markers around the track and we ask people to adjust their pace, to run either a slower or faster speed between different markers,” says Jan Burns, head of eligibility for INAS and professor of applied psychology at Canterbury Christ Church University. “We measure the accuracy at which they can change their pace.” Swimmers like Davies are tested slightly differently: by checking for the number of strokes over a certain distance, which tends to be lower than the stroke ratio for people without intellectual impairments.

When the tests are completed, it is the athletes that perform poorly in relation to able-bodied athletes who are allowed through. “If the athlete fails on those components [of sporting skill], then you say, this is exactly why this athlete fits this category,” says Van de Vliet.

It might seem counter-intuitive to select athletes specifically because they’re not particularly good at a sport. But Van de Vliet says it’s no different from the standard applied to Paralympians with physical impairments. “If you excel in performance,” he says, “then that impairment is not limiting your ability to compete on an equal basis” with the able-bodied.

Now that athletes with intellectual impairment have rejoined the Paralympics, sports researchers are looking to the future. They’re designing more tests that will allow competitors in a broader range of sports, including a basketball test that will look at an athlete’s ability to comprehend tactics, shoot accurately and dribble well.

Bringing back the same sport that led to the cheating scandal may seem like tempting fate, but it’s hard to see how the same sort of foul play that went on in Sydney could ever be repeated at the Paralympics. If competitors try to pretend they’re worse at a sport than they really are to get into the Games, Van der Vliet says testing overseen by medical and technical experts will catch them out. “When you see inconsistent testing patterns, it should be kind of a red flag,” he says. Burns agrees. “It’s so sophisticated to be able to do that. You’d have to be extremely experienced, know [the system] inside out and practice across so many different tests.”

For swimmers like Davies, it seems all the testing has been worth it. She has said she didn’t expect to get to these Games, and was hoping to compete at the Rio Paralympics in 2016. If the new system for qualifying athletes with intellectual impairments holds up in London, she may just get her wish.

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So it goes in this most remarkable Olympic summer in Britain. The nation’s sports-mad fans celebrated Team GB’s impressive medal haul (65 medals, of which 29 were gold, making it the best return in over a century; Great Britain finished third in the gold-medal standings), and they’re eagerly anticipating similar success in the Paralympics, which could see GB end up in second, only behind the Chinese.

(PHOTOS: Olympic Highlights in Photographs)

Before the London Games, roughly 1.2 million tickets had been purchased for the Paralympics, but a further 600,000 were bought during the Olympics; now marquee sports such as track and field in the Olympic Stadium, cycling at the velodrome and wheelchair tennis at Eton Manor on the Olympic Park have pretty much sold out. “Our aim now is to sell every single ticket,” International Paralympic Committee chairman Philip Craven recently said. “It would be fitting that when the Paralympic movement returns to its spiritual birthplace … it does so in front of packed, sold-out venues [the original idea for the Paralympics stems from the 1948 Stoke Mandeville Games held in Britain for World War II veterans with spinal-cord injuries].”

To put the stellar ticket sales into perspective, consider that there have been 15 Paralympics since the Rome Games of 1960, and most have resulted in vast swaths of tickets being given away. Even though Beijing managed to sell a considerable 1.8 million tickets four years ago, that exact same amount was nonetheless also handed out in order to fill the stadiums. Athens only sold 850,000 tickets in 2004, although Sydney did sell 1.2 million back in 2000. Fans “are looking for another opportunity to come back to the venues and enjoy sport,” remarked Tim Hollingsworth, the chief executive of the British Paralympic Association, ahead of this year’s Games.

(VIDEO: The Sights and Sounds of the Olympics)

The pricing certainly appears more competitive than with the recent Olympics, which generated some controversy over its $1,150 top-price AA ticket for track and field, and $3,200 for the opening ceremony. (Plenty of $32 tickets, however, were also made available across many events.) But for just $16, an ExCeL day pass offers entry into a host of Paralympic sports such as wheelchair fencing, powerlifting, table tennis, sitting volleyball and boccia. The most expensive ticket to a Paralympic sporting event costs $71, which is less than the cheapest ticket for the men’s 100-m final during the Olympics, and many are in the $16 to $24 price range.

The opening and closing ceremonies during the Paralympics aren’t exactly being sold for a pittance — top-price tickets will run you $790 for the former and $550 for the latter — but you’re still in for a set of shows that should rival the Olympics and sees the Queen return to open the Games (though it was confirmed on Friday by Buckingham Palace that Prince Philip won’t be attending because of his recent health issues). The opening ceremony is called Enlightenment and was conceived by artistic directors Jenny Sealey and Bradley Hemmings, who hope to shine a light on artists with disabilities. “We want our ceremony to be both spectacular and deeply human at the same time,” Sealey and Hemmings wrote in an e-mail to TIME. “Having worked together in outdoor theater over a number of years, we’re determined that the ceremony should speak from the heart, tell a story, demonstrate our world-leading deaf and disabled artists and rise to the emotional and historic occasion of the homecoming of the Paralympic Games.” And thousands of volunteers have given up their time for a curtain-raiser Coe called “a great showcase of the skills and excellence of disabled artists.”

(VIDEO: Sebastian Coe, Olympic Builder)

There’s a certain symmetry for the closing ceremony, which is called Festival of Flame. As with the Olympics, Kim Gavin, David Arnold and celebrated film director Stephen Daldry are reprising their roles as artistic director, music director and executive producer. Coldplay will headline the finale and front man Chris Martin fully understands the magnitude of the event, labeling it “one of the biggest nights of our lives.”

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Pistorious has achieved his dream: he will represent South Africa in the London Olympics, as Pistorious qualified in both the individual 400m race, and the 4x400m relay. It is a historic achievement, marking the first time ever that an amputee will compete in both the Olympics and Paralympics.

(MORE: Athletes Prepare for the 2012 Olympic Games)

The news came Wednesday, as the South African Olympic committee added Pistorius’ nameto its list of 125 track and field athletes coming to London. He has run two Olympic ‘A’ standard times over the course of this year, but was unable to do so at an international meet, as required by the national federation’s qualifying standards.

For the South African Olympic committee, who insisted throughout the qualifying season that they would not make an exception for Pistorius, the decision to include Pistorius, at the end, seemed easy. Speaking with the AP, the South African Olympic committee’s President Gideon Sam said “As I have said many times before, we are not taking passengers to London.”

The 25-year old took to Twitter to express his own delight at the turn of events:

Today is really one of the happiest days of my life! Will be in @London2012 for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games!

Pistorius is undoubtedly one of South Africa’s best home grown sporting talents. He has garnered media attention for both his abilities on the track as well as controversies around the tools of his trade. His Flex-Foot Cheetahs – the J-shaped carbon fiber prosthetics that mimic the way a cat’s hind legs work – have been used by amputees since the 1990s, though not many have excelled in running with them the way Pistorius has.

For the South-African, who has grown up playing sports with able-bodied athletes, qualifying for the Games was a long battle. The IAAF banned him from the Olympics in Beijing, arguing that carbon-fiber limbs provided him with an advantage over other competitors. The Court of Arbitration overturned these findings however, noting that those using artificial limbs had disadvantages in accelerating at the start. (Pistorious was not fast enough to qualify for Beijing).

In 2011, there was controversy also at the IAAF World Athletics Championships when he was left out of the deciding race for the South African team. He nevertheless won a silver medal – again, making history as the first amputee to win an able-bodied medal.

(MORE: How To Stash Olympic Medals Before the Games)

As a four-time Paralympic gold-medal holder (he took gold in the 100m, 200m and 400m), Pistorius will be hoping to not just run alongside able-bodies athletes; he’ll be shooting for a medal. If he won one, he’d become an even bigger inspiration – though he’s already inspired the world many times over.