Paralympic Beer Cups Coming to Park

(ATR) Paralympic Park spectators need to drink more beer to get access to special edition Paralympics cups.

The Skol-branded special edition Olympic cups were a huge hit during Rio 2016. The cups featured the look of the Games and stylized pictograms of each Olympic sport discipline. Spectators clogged up beverage lines to make sure they were not receiving duplicates of the iconic yellow cups.

On the first day of competition, Paralympic fans were greeted with the yellow Olympic versions, instead of the new orange Paralympic editions.

Rio 2016 communications director Mario Andrada told Around the Rings the Paralympics cup "made its debut" at the opening ceremony. The cups will be available in the Paralympic Park as soon as leftover Olympics cups are sold.

"Skol has a stock of Olympic cups and by public demand they decided to sell those and get rid of those before selling the Paralympic cups here," Andrada said. "A lot of people claimed through the company’s website they wanted to complete their collection before starting a new collection. [Skol] believes starting tomorrow they will be selling only Paralympics cups."

Ticket Milestone Surpassed

A record number of people are expected in the Paralympic Park tomorrow.

Mario Andrada, Rio 2016 communications director, says Rio 2016 sold 167,000 tickets for the Paralympic Park on the first Saturday of competition. That figure represents the largest single day of ticket sales in the park for both the Olympics and Paralympics.

The increase in sales has pushed the Rio 2016 Paralympics to be the second most attended Paralympics ever.Andrada told reporters today that over 1.8 million tickets have been sold for the Paralympics. That is more tickets sold than the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.

Rio will not catch the 2.8 million tickets sold for the London 2012 Paralympics, as only 2.5 million tickets are available for sale. Organizers estimate they will sell 2.4 million tickets for Rio 2016.

Website Issues Resolved

IPC communications director Craig Spence says increased security on the Paralympics website should prevent any more hacks.

Spence said organizers are still determining the origin of the hack, although they don’t believe issues will persist throughout the Games.

"Our priority was to improve security," Spence said. "We are up 75 percent compared to the first day of competition on London. These will be the first Paralympic Games in history where we engage over 1 billion people [worldwide]."

Written by Aaron Bauer in Rio de Janeiro

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