The 2000 Summer Paralympic Games or the XI Summer Paralympics were held in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, between 18 and 29 October. The Sydney Paralympics was last time that the Summer Paralympics which were organized by two different Organizing Committees. In this edition, a record 3,801 athletes from 120 National Paralympic Committees participated in 551 events in 18 sports and until the 2006 Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne,was the second largest sporting event ever held in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. Sydney was the eighth city to host the Olympics and the Paralympics on same venues at the same year, and the first since Barcelona 1992 that they were organized in conjunction with the Olympics. They were also the first Paralympic Games outside the Northern Hemisphere and also in Oceania. Host City Bid Process On 9–13 September 1993, during the 10th International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Executive Board Session the entity carried out an assessment and announced that four (Beijing, Berlin, Manchester and Sydney) of the five finalist cities for the 2000 Summer Olympics had met the specific conditions to host the Paralympic Games. It was not mandatory that candidate cities host both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but motivated by the events in the lead up to the 1996 Summer Paralympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided in 1993 that the newly created International Paralympic Committee (IPC) would become a stakeholder in the Olympic city selection process. This allowed the IPC the opportunity to gauge the intentions of candidate cities around hosting the Paralympics through the addition of specific topics in the questionnaires. This also allowed the IPC to establish its own selection commission alongside the IOC, however the two functioned independent from one another. When it became public that 5 cities had finalised the process to host the 2000 Summer Olympics, the IPC evaluated each separately and sent the name of the 4 four that fit within its expectations to host the Paralympics. Three cities (Beijing, Berlin and Manchester) were treating the Paralympics as an integral part of their bid, while Sydney, due to Australian legislation at the time, presented a separate bid supported by the Sydney Olympic Bid Committee which gave late but crucial support. While Berlin, Beijing and Manchester presented economically strong bids, Sydney presented simpler documentation, but technically better, which gave it advantages from the beginning. Unlike its competitors, the Australian bid was an adaptation