Though it’s hardly surprising that scores of Britons were cheering for Peacock’s awe-inspiring performance, it should be a wake up call to broadcasters and corporate sponsors who’ve been notoriously slow to embrace the Paralympics. While the Olympics receive seemingly exhaustive coverage from the global media, much of that focus drops off for the Paralympics, which takes place weeks later. Olympic athletes routinely become household names through brand sponsorships and prolific media coverage, but Paralympians are largely ignored.

(PHOTOS: Highlights from the Paralympics)

At first glance, the Paralympics should be the easiest event in the world to promote: every four years some of the world’s most phenomenal athletes compete against one another in mind-boggling feats of strength and will, after overcoming some of the most devastating, heart-wrenching, worst-case-scenario tragedies imaginable.

Yet in the past, promotion of the Paralympic Games, especially in the U.S., has been dismal or non-existent. This year NBC, who has the rights to the Games, isn’t showing any live coverage at all and will only broadcast four one-hour long segments of the Paralympics in total. Compare this with the hundreds of hours of coverage they devoted to the Olympic Games and it’s hard not to cringe.

The way individual athletes are treated is also noticeably different. Sure, Jonnie Peacock is now a household name in Britain, but he only became so recently. And for much of the world, simply naming a Paralympian — save for Oscar Pistorius, who ran in the Olympic Games as well — would likely be a struggle. But athletes who’ve competed in the Olympic Games, like Team GB’s Jessica Ennis or Victoria Pendleton, became recognizable figures months ago as corporate brands eagerly snatched them up for ad campaigns.

(MORE: Will This Be the First Paralympics to Sell Out?)

But it’s possible that London 2012 could mark a change in the way the Paralympics are marketed both by the media and by sponsors.

In Britain, broadcasting rights to the Paralympics were granted to Channel 4, which seized on the opportunity to promote the event like never before.  “Many UK viewers had not actually seen the Paralympics before, certainly not in mainstream numbers,” says Dan Brooke, the chief marketing and communications officer for Channel 4. “So not only did we have to put the Paralympics on the map, but we had to reposition it.” The public broadcasters launched a mutli-platform campaign that included social media, billboards that cheekily read “Thanks for the warm-up”, newspaper editorials, TV spots, online videos and one simply sublime commercial.

The effort paid off. In addition to the six million viewers the broadcaster pulled in for Peacock’s victory, Channel 4 has also reportedly drawn record numbers of viewers almost every night since the Paralympics began;  the ratings for the event’s opening ceremony were highest they’d been in ten years. “Most importantly,” Brooke adds, “people have been telling us that attitudes to people with impairments have been changing in one really enormous, bounding leap. And that, for a public broadcaster like ourselves, is exactly the kind of thing we were put on earth to do.”

(PHOTOS: Highlights from the 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony)

London 2012 has also seen corporate sponsors eager to spearhead the Paralympics promotion. The massive supermarket chain Sainsbury’s bid to be Paralympic-only sponsors, rather than act as sponsors for both sets of Games. Jat Sahota, the company’s head of sponsorship, said that they were keen to jump on board as sponsors of what they predict is a growing event. “If we waited for the Paralympics to become big, that’d be the wrong attitude,” he said. “We wanted to help them become big.”

Alexis Schafer of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) explains that while there’s still a long way to go when it comes to promoting the Paralympics and marketing the Games, accomplishing the task will be a three-way effort between the organizing committees, the corporate sponsors who provide funding and the media. “It’s a constant dialogue,” he says, adding that the IPC is a young organization, created only in 1989, and it’s still continually trying to build the Paralympics. “But I think we have to take it step by step. It’s just sometimes you realize that this progress isn’t as quick as some people would wish.”

But he has high hopes for  Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016, the homes of the next Winter and Summer Games, respectively. If this summer’s Games are any indication, he feels the Paralympics are headed in the right direction. “I think it’s fantastic to see here in London that we really got it right, we really got it going.”

MORE: Tracing the Paralympics’ British Roots

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

It was force of habit. He didn’t have a race that day, or even a scheduled training session with his coach of 16 years, Bob Bowman. For two decades, the 27-year-old Baltimorean was up at dawn for his first of two daily swims, clicking off the millions of laps of training that earned him the title of nothing less than the greatest Olympian of all time. With an unprecedented 22 Olympic medals, 18 of them gold, he is now the most decorated Olympian ever,

“There will be no more staring at the black line [at the bottom of the pool] for four hours every day,” he said that morning in London. “This is the first day of my retirement. The first day of my new life.”

MORE: After Ending Career With a Gold, Is Phelps the Greatest Olympian of All Time?

And just what will he do with the rest of his life? Travel and golf, he told the reporters gathered to document the first day of the rest of his life.

But who is he kidding? The pool and Phelps will be forever linked, forged in an unbreakable bond as interlocked as the five Olympic rings. Like the whiff of chlorine that trails every water baby, he won’t be able to shed the sport of swimming so easily.

Nor does he want to. While always cagey about disclosing his personal goals during his competitive career, Phelps has said that one legacy he hopes to leave behind is a sport that is stronger, bigger and higher profile than when he entered it. “I want to grow the sport of swimming,” is his refrain. His agent, Peter Carlisle of Octagon, says that desire was born early, at his first meeting with the then-15 year old Phelps, who was shopping for representation. Ensconced in a lawyer’s office, Carlisle and his team were talking to Phelps’ team as if the teen wasn’t in the room. During the lunch break, Carlisle prodded the boy to speak up. Nervous, Phelps dropped his plate of food but had his answer: he wanted to see swimming on SportsCenter.

“The problem was, at that time, Michael had this abstract potential, but he didn’t have a platform,” says Carlisle. “He was the youngest swimmer to break a world record but if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? The general public had no idea about Michael or about swimming. That’s where we were in 2002.”

MORE: Built for Speed

Fast forward a decade, and swimming does pop up on SportsCenter, world championships earn coverage by ESPN, and at the past two Olympic Games, it occupied the place of honor during NBC’s prime time coverage of events. There’s no question that Phelps and his journey, first to surpass Mark Spitz’s 36-year old record of most (seven) Olympic golds in a single Games, and then to best Russian gymnast Larissa Latynina’s 48-year old record of most medals earned by an Olympian, were a big part of that. (And that his brief falls from grace, including a DUI arrest and a three-month suspension from USA Swimming in 2009 after a photo of him inhaling from a marijuana pipe surfaced, only made his story more human — and newsworthy.)  In Athens in 2004, in Beijing in 2008 and in London in 2012, the big question in the aquatic center and in the minds of the billion of viewers who tuned in to watch swimming worldwide was: ‘could Phelps do it?,’ would Phelps do it?’

“There is no question that Michael brings instant rock star status to any swim meet,” says Evan Morgenstein, president and CEO of PMG Sports, an agency that represents Olympic athletes. Agrees Carlisle: “Michael’s journey was unique enough to draw in and keep an audience. He kept the general public interested, and helped increase the relevance of swimming for them.”

MORE: How Phelps Made Swimming History

Since 2001, USA Swimming membership has increased by 25%, and more of those athletes are sticking with the sport (70% in 2010 compared to 65% in 2001). Clearly not all of that interest can be directly attributed to Phelps, but after Beijing, the organization saw its highest increase in year-round memberships in 23 years. At the last swim of his career in London, fans poured into the Aquatic Center from around the globe.

“He is a legend; it’s unbelievable what he has achieved,” Victor Kolar, a gym teacher from the Czech Republic who came to watch Phelps with his wife and two daughters marveled. “We want to be past of his last celebration.” For his daughters, aged 12 and 7, Kolar hopes Phelps will serve as a role model. “He showed great determination to succeed, and it’s good to learn from him, learn how to win, and learn how to be resilient,” he said.

Still, as challenging as his remarkable feats in the pool were, Phelps faces an even bigger obstacle now that he won’t be diving into races any more. Granted, in some ways his dream of building up the sport of swimming becomes easier, as he sheds his rigorous training schedule and becomes freer to become an ambassador for the sport. (An offhand comment that he has always wanted to dive with great whites elicited a flood of offers from dive outfits and even the Discovery Channel, which plans to document a trip to South Africa in which he cage dives to get up close and personal with the beasts to air during, natch, Shark Week.)

But will people still watch swimmers splashing anonymously in a pool covered in goggles and a cap if Phelps is not among them? “Everybody in the swim industry, whether a coach, a parent to a swimmer or a swimmer, is asking the same thing,” says Morgenstein, who represents gymnast Nastia Liukin and swimmer Dara Torres. “They know that their future in some way, shape or form is dependent on how popular the sport of swimming is. If the sport stays popular because Michael Phelps stays involved with it, then he has created a legacy beyond his accomplishments.”

MORE: The World’s Greatest Athlete Wins Gold in London. And so Does Usain Bolt. Is Decathlete Ashton Eaton Really Better than Bolt?

And that legacy goes both ways. “You can’t just take Michael as a totally independent, disconnected character and create a brand around him as though he doesn’t depend on the sport, or the sport doesn’t depend on him,” says Carlisle. “He needs the platform of swimming; he needs the Olympics and the Olympic partners. Otherwise the moment he is done competing, he’s not relevant any more.”

And the reality is that swimming, and swimmers, jostle in a crowded US sports market that rewards sports with well-established, high profile professional leagues. Swimming comes around once every four years, and while there are no shortage of swim programs at the youth and college level, it lacks a professional circuit of events that can sustain a swimmer who wants to turn his laps in the pool into a living. Sure Phelps was able to break through and get his story covered on ESPN (and on the cover of TIME), and become a regular spokesperson for sponsors like Subway (even in non-Olympic years), and, more recently, Louis Vuitton. But it literally took an historic feat of Olympic proportions for him to earn that status.

When I first spoke to Phelps before the Athens Games in 2004, he was frustrated by the corporate world’s lack of interest in swimming. “Look at the new Sprite commercial, it’s LeBron [James],” he said. “You don’t see a swimmer doing a Sprite commercial.” And the sad truth is, you still don’t. “Swimming is always going to be an Olympic sport,” says Morgenstein. But he acknowledges that Phelps has a unique opportunity to spin the sport’s cycle beyond its usual four-year revolution. “Millions of kids swim during the summer,” he says. “It would seem that there is enough momentum associated with Michael that he can motivate kids above and beyond his swim centers.”

Whether that is in the form of a professional swimming league that allows Olympic-eligible athletes to earn winnings depending on their point total in a series of meets, or whether it means creating a youth league modeled after Little League that gives promising swimmers more support throughout their career, will be up to Phelps. His stature in the sport is such that he might be only one to seed such a change. “Michael and I are putting together very unique ideas for some events that are media and spectator friendly that haven’t been done before,” says Bowman, in a hint of where we might see Phelps next.

VIDEO: Michael Phelps: How Boxing Makes You a Better Swimmer

For now, however, he says Phelps is focusing on expanding his swim schools, which are part of the Michael Phelps Foundation, begun in 2008 with the $1 million bonus check he received from Speedo for breaking Spitz’s record. Phelps’ im program, which is taught at the schools, begins with water safety for children who have never been in a pool and extends to stroke training. So far, it’s part of 28 Boys and Girls Clubs in the U.S. and Phelps hopes to expand the program to all 200 of the Clubs with a pool and provide transportation for youngsters without access to pools so they can participate as well. Growing the sport will mean nurturing its grass roots, and not simply lending his presence when it’s convenient, a commitment that Phelps seems to have already made.

“I want to take swimming to a new level,” he said before leaving London. “It hasn’t reached the peak I want it to reach. That’s tough for swimming in the U.S. because we have so many sports, so many professional sports in the spotlight. Hopefully we can catch up and be on the same level. I’ve been able to see the sport change so much in the last four years, it’s shocking.”

It will take more of that kind of shock, and the constant reminders of the awe that Phelps has inspired during his career, to draw both new swimmers and corporate sponsors into the sport. “We will certainly miss the thrill of watching him compete,” says Bowman, “but he will still have a platform, and more people involved in swimming can only help to grow the sport.” And maybe one day put a swimmer in a Sprite commercial.

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

It was a clever move, and one that chimed with Olympic ideals. “London’s vision is to reach young people around the world,” said Seb Coe, who led the British bid and later became chairman of the Games’ organizing committee. “To connect them with the inspirational power of the Games, so they are inspired to choose sport.”

(MORE: With Olympic Memories Lingering, More Brits Are Diving Into Sports)

Here’s another ambitious pledge made that day: “The regeneration of the area around the Olympic Park is already under way…The Games will dramatically improve the lives of Londoners.” The speaker was the mayor of London—not Boris Johnson, the current incumbent who presided over the Games, but his predecessor Ken Livingstone, ousted in elections in 2008.

And unlike most talk of legacy, the first part of Livingstone’s claim was tangible. A chunk of the East End, an area blighted by the decline of the docks that once fueled its economy and the collapse of manufacturing industries that took up some of the slack, was already in the throes of transformation. The boost from the Olympics sped that change. You feel it in the air-conditioned comfort of the high-speed Javelin trains serving, since July, the Stratford station complex that is the main gateway to the Olympic Park and linking the area to central London and the south coast of England. You can walk through 175,000 square meters (that’s 1.88 million square feet for imperialist readers) of Westfield Stratford City, a high-end shopping mall opened in September 2011. From its food court, you see, stretching out into the distance, the Olympic Park, a gleaming collection of new buildings that promise enduring tourist attractions, sports facilities and entertainment venues, office space and mixed income housing.

The Olympics has alighted on the boroughs of Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney, as I wrote in a piece ahead of the Games, like an enormous, shiny spaceship. But leave its confines and you’ll begin to understand the scale of the challenge to be met if locals, much less London’s further-flung populations, are to see their lives dramatically improved.  In March I accompanied housing enforcement officers and police during raids on slum properties in Newham. A garden shed, converted without insulation, provided cold comfort for four young Asian men, at a cost of £800 (US$1,268) per month, they said. The tenant in a Union Jack T-shirt who opened the door to a nearby two-bedroom terraced house was less forthcoming, but his hacking cough told a story (“tuberculosis is rife in these places,” said one official). The arrangement of bedding suggested as many as 18 people had taken lodging on the premises, lining the pockets of an unscrupulous landlord who will understand that the powers of the authorities to intercede are limited and the appetite to do so also circumscribed. “If every London borough rooted out baleful practices such as these, a significant number of people would be revealed who would then need to be rehoused,” says Tony Travers, the director of LSE London, a research center at the London School of Economics.

(PHOTOS: Olympic Highlights)

Newham is working to tackle its slum landlord problem and to find innovative ways of increasing its stock of affordable housing; it had schemes before the Olympics to engage kids from hardscrabble backgrounds in sport and music. But another way to reduce the press of people looking for the cheap accommodation is to attract more affluent residents and retain the upwardly mobile. “I bought a house with a not-very-nice front; it was a mess, [it was] three weeks before the smell of piss was gone from the garden,” said Robin Wales, the mayor of Newham when I met him back in March. “But my neighbors have done up five houses on their side and it looks quite nice. When you get that investment in the look of it, the whole area starts to turn.”

“The Olympics is regenerating the area we have been regenerating anyway,” he added. “[But] it will be done faster. It has moved much quicker.”

But will regeneration benefit the people living outside the spaceship? Some of them, at least. Unemployment rates in Newham are among London’s highest. My unscientific survey of Westfield mall employees failed to turn up a single local, but several thousands of Newham residents have reportedly found jobs there and others were involved in readying the Olympic Park.

(PHOTOS: The Show-Stopping Olympic Closing Ceremony)

My survey also revealed that people working and shopping in Westfield rarely venture beyond its glossy boundaries. They were unaware of the mall’s alter ego, just a pole vault across the road. Gold and silver jewelry is on sale at the Stratford Centre, opened in 1974. But a tranche of these wares are second-hand, pawned by their owners for cash. A discount chain, Poundland, competes with a branch of a rival chain whose name promises yet bigger bargains: a 99p Store. (What can you get for 99p/$1.57? A wide range of products including a buoyancy aid called a Super Swim Noodle and a large family pack of the traditional English cookies, Custard Creams.) In the two malls, old Newham and new Newham coexist, side-by-side, but rarely intersecting.

That is a pattern often seen in gentrifying urban areas. One question that will determine the extent of the gentrification is whether the communities begin to integrate and stabilize. One question that will determine the truth of Livingstone’s IOC promise is what will happen to those people outside the spaceship as it extends its tentacles. Here, as in so many assessments of the Olympic legacy, there will be no swift or definitive answers. Let the guessing Games commence.

VIDEO: The Sights and Sounds of the Olympics

(MORE: Boris Johnson: The London Mayor is the Biggest Winner of the Olympics)

On September 7, 2013, in Buenos Aires, Argentina,  Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid will learn which of the three cities’ bids was enticing enough to convince the IOC to let it host the greatest show on earth. (Both Baku and Doha had to suffer the fate of being non-selected applicant cities, whereas the Italian government withdrew Rome’s bid due to the country’s perilous economic situation). The smart money is on Tokyo, but the Olympics have never been easy to predict. TIME looks at the pros, cons and odds of the three locations.

TOKYO (6/5 odds)

The British bookmakers have installed the Japanese capital as the favorite to host the Games and the reasons do appear compelling, even though this is the second Olympics in a row in which they’re bidding (the Olympics were also held there in 1964). “I think Tokyo is a pretty safe bet,” says Stefan Szymanski, the Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management, in the department of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan (the full audio of the interview is below). “You can trust the Japanese to get everything on time and to budget. You can be sure they will run an efficient, safe Games and there will be no risks involved. You can be sure all the technology’s going to work. So I think it’s big pluses on those fronts.”

Japan is currently basking in a post-Olympic glow, much like Great Britain. The Japanese had a medal haul in London unlike any other in their history, winning 38 medals, which put them in sixth place in the standings, if you go on the total amount of medals. Half a million people are estimated to have packed downtown Tokyo to welcome back the athletes, but reservations remain. “I remember the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 was one of the most beautiful Olympics ever,” writes veteran Japanese sports journalist Kozo Abe in an email to TIME. “At that time we Japanese really needed to stage the Olympics to recover the national pride after World War II. Compared from that time, we don’t have an urgent need to stage the Tokyo Olympics now.” And Professor Szymanski sees two issues: The first is “a relatively low level of support, only 66% in favor, but that’s well behind their rivals. The IOC only wants to go places where they will be welcomed with adulation. And then the other problem is rather more imponderable: because of the earthquake last year, questions are being raised about the energy future of Tokyo.”

But the feeling persists that it’s still Tokyo’s bid to lose, if only because it might be considered Asia’s turn to host the 2020 Games. “A very coherent, sensible bid,” argues Szymanski. “And in terms of the politics, Asia would be a good place to hold the Games this time. I think having had the Games in London this time, I think Istanbul and Madrid will be seen as European bids. I think that puts Tokyo at an advantage and the others at a disadvantage.”

And Abe believes that the awarding of the Games to Tokyo is important for its people: “Japan is still poor in its economy and politicians are unreliable, and we have so many difficult issues with Korea and China. We need something that makes our nation together again for some good reason. That must be Tokyo Olympics 2020.”

(MORE: Gracious Losers: Japan’s Women Celebrate Silver in a Soccer Rematch with the U.S.)

ISTANBUL (5/2)

Could Istanbul pull off a shock and be the third Olympics in a row to be awarded to a city not considered the front-runner? Both Paris and Chicago were perceived to be more likely choices than eventual winners London and Rio and all involved with the Turkish bid will be hoping it’s fifth time lucky for a city yet to host the event.

“Should Istanbul be the winner, for the first time the Olympics will be held by a country in the Turkic and Islamic world,” said Youth and Sports Minister Suat Kilic. According to Szymanski, Istanbul offers the highest amount of support within any of the three nations – 87% – and the fact that Turkey is a “newly growing economy … might generate some sympathy from other IOC members, who might say ‘it’s their turn,’ rather in the way South Africa got the 2010 World Cup.”

But Istanbul’s main stumbling block could  be  in not receiving full support from the IOC’s executive board. According to the Associated Press, an official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the board voted unanimously in favor of Tokyo and Madrid at 12-0 whereas Istanbul got an 11-1. Szymanski thinks they also have another problem, which is sports-related: Istanbul is in the running to host the 2020 European soccer championships. “That really is quite foolish seeing as it’s enough of a challenge to host the Summer Games, it’s really absurd to think they would want to do that and, in the same year, host the second biggest football tournament in the world,” he says. “It almost suggests they believe they’re not going to get the Summer Games and this is their reserve strategy. I think that’s a big mistake and I think that will count heavily against them.”

(VIDEO: The Sights and Sounds of the Olympics)

MADRID (3/1)

The Spanish capital is bidding for a third consecutive time and, according to Szymanski, the Madrid bid is “potentially the lowest cost: they claim to have 78% of the venues built so not surprisingly they come out with a relatively small budget of just $2.4 billion … that really would be value for money. If you could do that, you would end up saying the Olympics was worthwhile in cost benefit terms rather than the economic drain it historically has been.”

But as Szymanski, and everyone else on the planet is aware, “you’d have to be blind not to know that Spain has serious economic problems.” Moreover, “unlike perhaps the Japanese energy problems, the economic crisis in Spain is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future so the debt overhang is going to be huge.”

Yet the locals remain optimistic. Gildo Seisdedos, a professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, says, “I think it’s time for Madrid. The 2016 bid was not the right time to do it in terms of Olympic politics, but now I think Madrid is quite a good option in terms of solidity as most of the venues are already done and it’s a good European option.”

But economic crisis notwithstanding, it would be hard to argue against the logic that it makes more sense to look outside of  Europe due to London hosting the most recent Games. It’s clear that Tokyo remains in the driver’s seat, but the allure of Istanbul’s bid may end up resulting in yet another IOC surprise.

PHOTOS: The London Olympics Come to a Show-Stopping Close

As the euphoria over the Olympics slowly fades, reports from sporting clubs and fitness centers across the country show that enthusiasm for sports has continued. London’s streets seem to be brimming with more joggers than usual – and many decked out in Team GB merchandise. Even a cursory survey of this reporter’s gym revealed more people huffing on treadmills or pumping iron than in pre-Games days. But it’s more than just casual observations; people across the country really are upping the ante when it comes to sports and fitness. According to David Cooper, the operations director for London’s Gymbox, the trainers at his gyms five locations have “definitely seen a change in the way people are exercising.”

(PHOTOS: Olympic Highlights)

Cooper points to Gymbox’s classes for women’s boxing, which have seen a 25% increase in attendance in the past month alone. But he also adds that it’s not just an increase in workouts he’s seeing, it’s also a change in the types of workouts. Pre-Olympics, he says, a lot of people were seeking out workouts that weren’t particularly demanding like, say, yoga, but now he’s noticing that “people are actually training really hard.” He’s particularly noticed that change among women, a shift he attributes to Olympians’ exposure and the fact that “so many people are being affected by the way athletes look.”

And then there are those who aren’t only motivated to get in shape, but seem to be setting their sights on Rio 2016. According to Richard Stock of British Rowing, clubs all around the country have “been inundated with interest” from people looking to take up the sport. He adds that his organization was even able to gauge a jump in interest in the sport from their own website metrics. While visits to the British Rowing site, which features information on rowing clubs around the country, were around 160 on June 1, the site had more than 5000 hits on August 1 – the day that Team GB’s Helen Glover and Heather Stanning won gold in rowing.

Frazer Snowdon of British Handball confirms a similar phenomenon. He noted in an email to TIME that while the organization’s website would typically receive anywhere from one to two thousand hits a week pre-Olympics, the second week of the Games saw the site struggling to handle nearly 38,000 hits. The boom in traffic crashed the site three times. Snowdon added that British Handball has been fielding a significant increase of inquiries from people who have a new found interest in the sport – which they’re actively working on passing on to Britain’s local handball clubs.

(PHOTOS: Olympic Winners Savor the Moment)

While sports advocates and government officials are understandably thrilled at Britain’s reinvigorated interest in sports, many are already working on ways to ensure the enthusiasm doesn’t wane. “The UK based the Olympic bid on legacy,” says Dave Stalker, CEO of Britain’s Fitness Industry Association, which represents more than 3000 private and public facilities across the UK. Stalker maintains it’s important for the country to focus on ensuring that young people, the next generation of Team GB athletes, are fostered and the UK is currently in a prime position to do so. He said the FIA has registered a sharp uptick in sports and fitness interest over the past few weeks, particularly in areas where Team GB did exceptionally well in, such as tennis and cycling.

Even better, according to Stalker, is politicians’ new-found enthusiasm for sport, which is the country’s best bet on establishing a set curriculum of sports and fitness in youth programs and schools. He says it’s encouraging to hear “talk from both David Cameron and Boris Johnson on the need for sport.”

Cameron, who has been criticized in the past for cutting funding for sports programs in schools, recently announced that he intends to make team sports mandatory in schools.  “I want to use the example of competitive sport at the Olympics to lead a revival of competitive sport in primary schools,” he said. “We need to end the ‘all must have prizes’ culture and get children playing and enjoying competitive sports from a young age, linking them up with sports clubs so they can pursue their dreams.”

Though he gladly welcomes the prime minister getting behind sports in Britain, Stalker says that competition shouldn’t be the end goal for everyone. “Obviously, everyone’s not going to be an Olympian,” he says. “For me, the best part of the legacy would be that we see more children doing more activity.”

MORE: 20 Paralympic Athletes to Watch at London 2012

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.”

MORE: Will This be the First Paralympics to Sell Out?

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.

MORE: Will This Be the First Paralympics to Sell Out?