Unofficial overnight figures revealed that a "record Paralympics athletic audience of 6.3 million people tuned in to Channel 4" to watch Team GB's Jonnie Peacock snatch the T44 100m crown from Oscar Pistorius" Thursday night, according to Arif Durrani of BRAND REPUBLIC. The five minute peak audience came at 9:25pm London time when Peacock, just 19 years old, set a new Paralympic T44 100m record of 10.90 seconds, five-hundredths of a second below his own personal best. Including the Paralympic Extra live streams, "the London 2012 audience peak was 6.7 million." It exceeded the previous record audience for Paralympic sport in the U.K., which was Sept. 2’s 4.4 million for the 200m T44 final. Earlier in the evening, 20-year-old Hannah Cockroft won Gold for Team GB in the T34 200m final with a time of 31.90 seconds, "watched by a peak audience of 4.1 million." In what was quickly dubbed "Thriller Thursday," David Weir made it a hat-trick of London Paralympic titles, after successfully defending his T54 800m crown, watched by a peak audience of 5.5 million (BRANDREPUBLIC.com, 9/7). In London, Euan Ferguson wrote that "there has been much to admire about Channel 4's coverage of the Paralympics." Everything, really. The fact that "Jonathan Edwards is basically Gary Lineker gone right; the fact they've done it at all, on a much lower budget than the BBC, and stuck through it despite having committed before the downturn; the knowledge, and even a graphics computer which explains, rather than boasts its whizziness; the plethora of wise, witty, disabled athletes appearing at table height as talking heads" (GUARDIAN, 9/8).
