During the nine-day championships at the QE II Stadium, which drew to a close yesterday, more than 1,000 athletes, 900 officials and 600 supporters from 70 countries converged on the city, some for up to four weeks.

About 2,500 visitors will have left Christchurch by tomorrow and despite not making a huge amount of money through ticket sales, Blanchfield predicts a bounty has been made for the city.

Blanchfield said: "New Zealand can probably forget about hosting the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games in the future, but an event such as this is perfect and has proved lucrative for the area.

"From the economic point of view we've assessed that there has been at least $12 million added for the Christchurch community due to the amount of people that have been living and spending here over a period of time.

"It has been very challenging hosting the event because there are a lot of factors to consider when you have a number of athletes with a disability coming and competing.

"Transport and access are the two really important things.

"It has not always been easy for us to prepare for hosting this.

"We had a really good team working on the event and there are some great legacy benefits, such as the brand new, permanent warm-up track we put down for the event that can now be used by people in the area for many years to come.

"Overall, it has definitely been worth hosting this from a financial point of view."

Blanchfield added that despite the boost, the money injected into the economy will be tiny compared to the amount raised by the Rugby World Cup later this year.

"A lot of people came here on a shoestring budget and in some cases there wasn't much for them to spend in the shops," he said.

"The Rugby World Cup will have much more wealthy clients."

Paralympics New Zealand board member Marc Frewin added that the quality of competition was high.

"There were so many world records [broken] and so many champions.

"That race with Oscar Pistorius and Jerome Singleton in the 100 metres T44 final was just spine tingling.

"You just don't get excitement any better.

"This is the first time it's been out of Europe and there was a lot of focus globally on little New Zealand.

"I think yet again we've stepped and punched above our weight.

"We've had a lot of interest from National Paralympic Committees saying 'If the Kiwis can do it, then maybe we can too'.

"That is great."

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