The Rio 2016 Paralympic Games have begun!! On September 7th, the world's largest adaptive sporting event took over where the Olympics left off in Rio de Janeiro (and wow did they start off with a bang or what????)

Rio and the International Paralympic Committee put on an amazing display for the Opening Ceremony, but what has been even more amazing are the many, many events that started since then. The Paralympic Games are host to 22 different sports including Wheelchair Basketball, Swimming and Wheelchair Rugby. But that doesn't even begin to describe the number of individual events within each sport that take place. In order to put the athletes on a level playing field, they are split up into classes defined by the type and severity of their disability. This, as well as splitting up the competition by male or female, leads to hundreds of events with over 4,300 competing athletes.

The most striking example of how intense the Paralympics are is the Athletics. Sometimes referred to as Track and Field, Paralympic Athletics includes 177 medal events ranging from 100 meter sprints all the way up to the marathon as well as many field events including Long Jump and Javelin. Just check out this video and you'll know exactly what I mean:

Just count how many unique ways these athletes compete against one another. They can have visual impairments, any number of amputations, sprinting with one or two blade prosthetics, an assortment of different types of wheelchairs for different types of athletes and different events and, like the Special Olympics, there are events for athletes with intellectual impairments.

Athletics has provided some of the most exciting moments from the first few days of the event. Lex Gillette gave the United States their first medal of the 2016 games, winning silver in the Men's visually impaired Long Jump. He was narrowly beaten in the last round by Ricardo Costa de Olivera of Brazil.

On the wheelchair side, the biggest story heading into the Paralympics was Tatyana McFadden. She is racing in ALL SEVEN of the wheelchair track races in her classification: 100m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, 5000m, 4x400m relay and the marathon. As of now, she has only raced in one event, the 100m and narrowly finished with the silver medal by only 0.13 seconds, losing out to Liu Wenjun of China. With six events remaining, she approaches events she has a better history with. Amazingly, she has won the last FOUR Boston Marathon wheelchair races (and four London Marathons...)

One of the things that amazes me the most about the Olympics and the Paralympics is how they drive every competitor and the competition as a whole to higher and higher points every time the competition comes around. During one half hour stretch of the second day of competition, three world records as well as another Paralympic record were broken in Athletics alone. First, Lijuan Zou of China won the F34 Women's Javelin Throw with a world record. Then, Georgina Hermitage of Great Britain won gold with a world record in the T37 Women's 100m. Her fellow Briton, Sophie Hahn, followed that up with a Paralympic record in the next classification of T38 Women's 100m. Finally, (just for this hour, not the day or the sport) Akeem Stewart of Trinidad and Tobago secured a new world record in F44 Men's Javelin Throw. This shows the extremely high level of competition here as 12 other records fell just in that one day and just in Athletics.

Don't forget to watch along live on NBC Sports and on livestream on TeamUSA.org!