Paralympians have been breaking barriers for years, but four men broke new ground when they smashed the times set in the 1500 meters final at last month’s Olympics.
Competing in the Paralympics men’s 1500m T13 final on Monday for visually impaired athletes, the top four finishers all ran faster than 1500m Olympic champion Matthew Centrowitz Jr.
Abdellatif Baka of Algeria stormed to gold in a world record time of 3:48.29, followed by Tamiru Demisse of Ethiopia with silver and Henry Kirwa of Kenya with bronze. Remarkably Abdellatif’s brother Fouad, who just missed out on the podium with a fourth place, finished in a time of 3:49.84, which would still have been fast enough to get Olympic gold.
“It wasn’t easy to get this gold medal,” Abdellatif Baka said after winning a historic race. “I’ve been working one or two years nonstop, and it’s been very, very hard for me.”
Tactical race
The T13 classification is the least severe of the three classes for visually impaired athletes at the Rio Paralympics.
While the T13 finals had a fast pace from the start, the Olympic 1500m event was a tactical race which started out unusually slow and only got going in the final lap.
Centrowitz eventually won the gold in 3:50.00, the slowest winning time at an Olympics since 1932.
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The American, who controlled the race pretty much from the start as he fought off all attempts at overtaking him, had set a personal best in the 1500m last year in Monaco that was more than 20 seconds faster than his gold medal performance in Rio.
That still doesn’t take anything away from what the four Paralympians have achieved as both events were held at the same venue at the Estadio Olimpico in Rio de Janeiro and did not involve wheelchairs or prosthetic racing blades.