Great Britain’s Paralympians have bettered their tally of 34 gold medals from London 2012 after Dame Sarah Storey won the C5 road time trial to clinch the team’s 35th gold on day seven of the Games.
Storey’s win set up a gold rush in Rio. In one 15-minute burst on Wednesday afternoon, ParalympicsGB won their 36th, 37th and 38th gold as Kadeena Cox ran home to claim the women’s T38 women’s 400m final minutes before her Paralympic Village flatmate Karen Darke won the handcycling time trial. Sophie Wells then won the dressage grade four individual championship test to complete a memorable afternoon.
Steve Bate and his pilot Adam Duggleby won Britain’s third cycling gold of the day with victory in the tandem road time trial. It was the pair’s second gold of the Games after their tandem pursuit win.
Storey’s latest gold is her 13th, and her 24th Paralympic medal since her first Games in 1992, when she competed in Barcelona as a swimmer. She is Britain’s most successful female Paralympian but is not considering retirement yet. “Every day in training I’m pushing on,” she said. “I keep pushing myself in the knowledge my rivals are going to catch me and thankfully it’s not yet. I will do the data-crunching when I get home and see where we think we can head going forwards.”
Cox, who has multiple sclerosis, won gold in the velodrome and bronze in the 100m earlier in the Games to become the first British Paralympian since Isabel Newstead in 1988 to win medals in two sports in the same Games. She now has a third, and also broke a world record. “I wanted to do it for everyone out there with chronic conditions,” she said. “I was never going to give up because of them. I’m in agony now.”
ParalympicsGB are closing in on their target of a total of 121 medals of all colours in Rio. The team won 42 gold medals in Beijing in 2008 and will aim to break that tally in the coming days, though are unlikely to surpass their most successful ever Paralympics – when they won 107 golds and 331 in total in a very different era for the competition.
Great Britain’s biggest successes this year have come in the athletics stadium and in cycling. The team have won 12 track and field gold medals, four silvers and seven bronzes, while the cyclists have claimed 10 golds, two silvers and two bronzes on both the track and the street. The swimmers have claimed nine golds, seven silvers and 10 bronzes.
Gordon Reid, the Wimbledon wheelchair singles tennis champion, is through to Friday’s final in Rio, having beaten France’s Stephane Houdet. Elsewhere, Colin Lynch claimed Ireland’s fourth medal of the Paralympics, with silver in the men’s C2 road time trial. The former Formula One driver Alex Zanardi, who had both legs amputated following a motor-racing crash in 2001, successfully defended his H5 road time trial title on Wednesday.
