The first day of the 2020 Paralympics is in full swing and the Australian team has already bagged two gold medals. Absolutely not here to fuck spiders, and we bloody love it.
Today’s medal events so far have been in the track cycling, and both Paige Greco and Emily Petricola took out the top spot for their respective events. Paige knocked it out of the park in the women’s C 1-2-3 3000m Individual pursuit, while Emily smashed out the women’s C4 3000m Individual Pursuit.
Paige also set a new world record, as well as a personal record, and her gold was the very first final won at Tokyo 2020. You do love to see it.
It’s a huge result from two of the first opportunities Australia has had at kicking off the medal tally, and if this is the gold standard we’re putting up on day one, I’m bloody stoked to see how the rest of the Games play out.
The classifications for cycling events at the Paralympics are determined by the athlete’s impairments, with C class indicating athletes with a limb deficiency. This classification is then sub-divided into numbered categories based on severity of the athlete’s impairment, with lower numbers (eg. 1-2-3) indicating more severe limitations.
There’s actually a really useful breakdown of all the classifications for every event over on the official website, which I’m sure will be very handy when I’m sitting there watching the triathlon and trying to figure out what ‘PTWC1’ means.
The rest of Day 1 includes a few more medal opportunities for Aussie athletes, including the men’s and women’s 400m freestyle, men’s and women’s 100m butterfly, and the men’s 50m breaststroke and freestyle.
They’ll all be on tonight over in the Tokyo Aquatics Centre – and streaming on 7Plus – with the first medal event in the pool kicking off at about 6pm.
One day in and we’re already looking red hot. Love it. LOVE it.
