FACTBOX: Six decades of the Games

(Reuters) - Six decades after the Paralympics sporting competitions for disabled athletes began, 4,000 Paralympians have gathered in Beijing for 11-days of Games that open on Saturday.

Here are some key facts on Paralympics.

* The first Paralympics were held in 1948 at a hospital in Stoke Mandeville in southeast England. Organized by German-born neurosurgeon Ludwig Guttmann, who believed sport was good therapy, the participants were World War Two veterans with spinal cord injuries.

* The Stoke Mandeville Games began with an archery competition on the hospital's front lawn. Sixteen paralyzed British ex-servicemen and women competed, on the same day the London Olympic Games started.

* International competitors joined by 1952. The first Olympic-style games for athletes with disabilities were held in Rome in 1960, when about 400 wheelchair athletes from 23 countries competed. Winter Paralympics began in 1976.

* The Summer Paralympics have grown over the past four decades to become the world's second largest sporting after the Olympics. More than 4,000 athletes from 150 countries and regions will compete at Beijing's Paralympics, compared with the August 8-24 Olympics' 10,500 athletes from 204 countries and regions.

* Paralympians compete in 20 sports, compared with 31 at the Olympics. Participants from six different disability groups must meet minimum disability criteria which differ for each sport. Qualification is based on x-rays, medical diagnosis or muscle function examination.

* Sports such as archery and powerlifting are fairly standard, while other events have specially-adapted equipment, courts and rules.

* One sport, goalball, played by rolling a ball that contains a bell towards the opponents goal as they try to block it, was designed exclusively for blind or visually impaired atheletes. There are also five wheelchair sports: curling, dance sport, fencing, rugby and tennis.

* In Sitting Volleyball, played on a smaller than standard court, the athlete's pelvis must touch the ground at all times. On the cycling race track, visually impaired cyclists can compete on tandem bikes behind a sighted pilot.

* Doping is also an issue. At the Athens 2004 Paralympics judo champion Sergio Perez was stripped of his gold medal after failing a doping test, and two powerlifters from Azerbaijan were banned for life after testing positive for banned steroids.

Sources: Reuters, The International Paralympic Committee (www.paralympic.org)

(Writing by Gillian Murdoch, Beijing Editorial Reference Unit; Editing by Clare Lovell)