New York marathon  

Last year, at his fourth attempt, he won the New York City handcycle marathon.

Zanardi recalls how before the crash he and some friends watched "Born on the Fourth of July", in which a character played by Tom Cruise returns from Vietnam paralysed from the chest down.

"Finding myself in this situation, what would I do?" Zanardi said he asked himself at the time.

"And the answer was 'I would kill myself immediately'. But when I woke up after eight days, that was definitely the last reaction that went through my mind."

As Italians suffer a deep economic crisis which has provoked a surge in suicides among businessmen, his story in London this year could help lift the spirits of a nation.

"If somebody, in the difficult circumstances our country is facing right now, finds a little inspiration in me, I'm not only pleased, but touched," he said.

"I guess what you can see in what happened to me, is that really, you can find good things in every day of your life... every day can be a new opportunity to add something to your life," Zanardi said.  

"The fact that I've been able to qualify and to represent my nation in the next Olympic Games, it's something that I will forever tell my friends and my grandchildren, if I will be lucky enough to have some, one day. Having them sitting on what is left of my legs, I will say 'You know, Grandad went to London and did this and that'."