At times Paralympic sport can provide some rather jaw-dropping moments of double-take. Nestled in among the technical skill and the engrossing sense of competition on show at these Games there are also, as in all sport, moments of incredulity – and also of comedy. With the start of the wheelchair fencing competition at the ExCeL Arena morning a boisterous, mid-sized crowd was treated to some extraordinary displays of fast‑twitch lunge and block in what remains the only full-on combat sport practised by athletes in wheelchairs.

For the novice spectator, though, perhaps one of the more extraordinary sights came in the qualifying round of the men's individual foil as Poland's Stefan Makowski celebrated victory in his Category Amatch by leaping up out of his wheelchair and performing a brief capering dance. His opponent Artur Yusupov of Russia chose to stay seated. But then again he has no right leg. Victory complete, Makowski proceeded to propel himself off stage partly with the help of his own feet protruding, Fred Flintstone-style, between the wheels of his chair. If there seemed some nagging sense of inequity in this, given that the two men are rated as having an equivalent standard of physical function, this is to misunderstand the well-grooved mechanics of what is a grand old Paralympic sport. The more telling details came in the fraternal hug between the two athletes once Makowski had sat down in his chair again, the respectful congratulations offered by Yusupov after defeat to a more aggressive opponent, and in Makowski's own joy at having beaten a well-regarded competitor in what is a truly egalitarian discipline.

In many ways the return of wheelchair fencing's elite four‑yearly competition to Great Britain this summer is a rather poignant episode in Paralympic history. For a start wheelchair fencing is one of the more broadly pitched and inclusive Paralympic sports, a discipline open to anybody with a malady of the leg that effectively rules out Olympic-standard competition. This is a sport where those who rely on a wheelchair in everyday life compete against those who never sit in one other than to compete, with the chair reduced entirely to the level of a piece of equipment, a static base from which the fencer addresses his opponent.

Beyond this wheelchair fencing, which reaches its climax on Saturday with the team finals, is among the most aristocratic of Paralympic events, a founding discipline among the "parallel" sports devised at his Buckinghamshire base by the great emigre German neuroscientist Ludwig Guttmann. Guttmann it was who staged the first public demonstration of wheelchair fencing at Stoke Mandeville hospital in the early 1950s, with a match between an injured serviceman and Guttmann himself, who had fenced as a student at Heidelberg University. The sport was conceived as an activity for convalescent members of the armed forces: an aid to recovery but also a means of fostering self-esteem and what Guttmann saw as a sense of galvanising physicality. From a display event at the Stoke Mandeville Games of 1954, wheelchair fencing became a competitive sport at the Rome Games of 1960, at which point fencers still competed in the old-style heavyweight government-issue travaux chairs (as they became lighter over time there was a period when chairs were held in place by crouching stewards).

It is now a global sport as evidenced not just by the geographical span of competitors on show at the ExCeL, with Iraq, Argentina, Hong Kong and Malaysia among those nations represented. But also by the rise to competitive domination – always a sign of sporting gravitas – of China's fencers, with five out of six individual golds at the Beijing Games going to the Chinese men. At the Excel , as both the men's and women's individual foil kicked off in earnest, the most notable aspect was the unusually vociferous morning crowd, with enormous shrieking support, in particular, for France's Delphine Bernard. As the recurrent Marseillaise and cries of "Allez Delphine!" rattled around this low-ceilinged basement amphitheatre it seemed fair to suggest the French passion for fencing – which is a national sport – had safely transferred itself to the wheelchair version.

Under closer investigation the troupe of face-painted, tricolor-wigged ultras occupying the central stand were a class of French schoolgirls from Bernard's home town, Saint-Blaise in Brittany, a kind of touring Gallic St Trinian's here to support an athlete who has been adopted as a sporting "godmother" after developing a close relationship with local schools. "She's a hero … She said our support was really important … My favourite place in London is the Olympic Stadium," were the assorted verdicts of Oceane, Justine and Mailiz, in between spontaneous patriotic whoops and yee-haws, as French schoolgirl support continued to dominate the arena a full nine hours ahead of the evening's gold medal matches.

Elsewhere the Excel Arena was kept in a state of rapt attention by the quick-fire nature of the qualifying rounds. Bouts are won by the first competitor to five points, scored by touching an opponent's torso with the foil. In theory these matches can go on for three minutes. In practice they tend towards a blink-and-you-miss-it affair of all-out adrenal attack, a chair-bound blur of feint and jab that is instantly translated by a large spectator scoreboard above the competitors. Alim Latrèche of France was 2-0 up six seconds into his opening bout against China's Hu Daoliang. Latrèche eventually won 5-0 in something close to 12 seconds all in. His victory was greeted by a frenzy of partisan approval from the French schoolgirl contingent who by now were singing a jaunty chanson version of the baseline from Seven Nation Army.

Bernard would later exit the competition in the quarter-finals, beaten by Veronika Juhasz of Hungary. Latrèche returned to win a bronze medal bout against Marco Chima of Italy while Hu, recovered from his earlier thrashing, faced Anton Datsko of Ukraine in the gold match. To the disappointment of a large Brazilian contingent Datsko had earlier eliminated Jovane Silva Guissone of Brazil, who has one of the more dramatic back-stories. Jovane took up wheelchair fencing as a result of injuries caused by gunshot wounds sustained in a street robbery. If his success here carries with it undertones of a Guttmann‑esque validation of the sport's merits, this was always unlikely to detain either Jovane, gracious in defeat, or a thoroughly involved three-quarter full-house at the ExCeL on an opening day that confirmed, above all, the pure competitive appeal of this grand old indigenous Paralympic sport.