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The next Winter Olympics will be held in Vancouver in 2010. At the closing ceremony of any Winter Olympics, it's customary for the head of the International Olympic Committee to hand over the Olympic flag to the mayor of the next host city, who then waves the flag to mark the beginning of the countdown to the next Games. On Sunday, at the close of events in Turin, that person was Sam Sullivan. Sam has quadriplegia as the result (ironically, given that we're talking winter sports here . . .) of a ski-ing accident when he was 19. So he's got very limited movement in his hands.

But Sam had no intention of letting someone else wave the flag for him. He said, "There are many people with disabilities who have e-mailed me and said this is really quite a profound moment for them as well as for me and other people with disabilities in Canada". Engineers and volunteers in Vancouver rose to the challenge, and designed a three-angled flag holder to mount on the armrest of Sam's wheelchair. (There's a schematic of the design on the .) Sam practised his flag-waving technique in empty car parks at "unusual hours".

And it looks as though all that practising paid off. There's a photograph of Sam at the closing ceremony in Turin (looking very tiny in comparison with the five-metre flag he's waving) in this (click on picture 11 for the image).

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