Category: Athletics

Nowadays, the Paralympic Games are the second biggest sport event in the world. The Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, the opening ceremony for which is scheduled for August 28, 2024 on the Place de la Concorde in the French capital, are expected to be the biggest and most diverse yet.

The sporting movement that became the Paralympic Games was created, as the Stoke Mandeville Games, by Dr. Ludwig Guttman, on July 29, 1948. To coincide with the opening ceremony of the 1948 Summer Olympics, Dr. Guttman organised a low-key sports competition for paraplegic, wheelchair-bound patients at the spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, which he had founded four years earlier. A total of 16 injured servicemen and women, all British and all World War II veterans, competed in archery and netball events.

In 1952, a team of veterans from the Netherlands joined their British counterparts for the first International Stoke Mandeville Games. The first “official” Paralympic Games were staged in Rome in 1960 and have continued, as a quadrennial, Olympic-style event, ever since. Indeed, since the late twentieth century, following an agreement between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the Olympics and Paralympics have been staged in the same cities and venues.

The 1960 Rome Paralympic Games featured 400 athletes from 23 countries competing in just eight sports. By contrast, the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games is expected to attract over 4,400 athletes from over180 countries competing in 22 sports and a total of 549 medal events. Unlike at the two previous Games, which both featured two sports making their Paralympic debut, the IPC has opted not to add any new sports to the 2024 programme.

For decades, “dirtiest race in history” moniker belonged to the men’s 100-metre final at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. On September 24, 1988, Ben Johnson beat defending Olympic champion Carl Lewis in a world record time of 9.79 seconds, only to be stripped of his medal and record two days later. In fact, six of the eight competitors that day, including Lewis, wre found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs.

Fast forward three and half decades and the women’s 1500-metre final at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London was worse still. At the time of writing, six of the first nine finishers have since tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and five of them, namely Asli Cakir Alptekin and Gamze Bulut, both of Turkey, Tatyana Tomashova and Yekaterina Kostetskaya, both of Russia, and

Natallia Kareiva of Belarus, have had their names stricken from the Olympic record books.

Cakir, the gold medallist in London, has now been banned for life after a third doping offence, while Bulut, the silver medallist, subsequently served a four-year ban for abnormalities in her biological passport. Fourth-placed Tatyana Tomashova had already received a drugs ban in 2008 and is now banned from the sport for 10 years, while Kareiva (seventh) and Kostetskaya (ninth) both received two-year bans for doping offences in 2014. Fifth-placed Abeba Aregawi, who represented Ethiopia in London, was also provisionally suspended in 2016, having tested positive for meldonium, although the suspension was lifted due to insufficient evidence about how the drug is metabolised.

With so many Olympics sports in the mix, it can actually be difficult to wade through sports trivia to the essential facts of who has held the longest olympic record for a man or woman. The ‘what, where and when’ of it all draws various interpretations, some with more basis to them than others.

Case in point, some believe athlete Czech athlete Jarmila Kratochvilova, who in 1983 ran the women’s 800 metres in just 1:53.28 holds the olympic record. However, while her achievement at Olympiastadion in Munich, Germany deserve to be acknowledged it did not in fact take place, as stated in several places online, “at the 1983 Olympics”.

The actual 800 meter olympic record is the 1980 1:53.43 time set by Soviet middle-distance runner Nadezhda Olizarenko while winning gold in the women’s 800 metres at the 1980 Moscow held Olympics. Her time remains the second fastest ever for the event, behind only the aforementioned Kratochvilova time, by 15 hundredths of a second. Imagine the odds of knowing, or rather deducing, that a world record was about to be achieved and considering which betting broker to opt for (since they offer the best odds, bookies and arbitrage betting opportunities, even to those with a talent for picking winners) in such a scenario. It certainly provides food for thought when watching big sporting events.

The longest held Olympic record by anyone belongs to American Robert “Bob” Beaman, who, in October 18, 1968, won the men’s long jump at the Olympics in Mexico City with a distance of 8.90m. This topped the existing world record by an impressive 55cm. Testament to his record was the fact that it remained a world record until August 1991, when fellow American Mike Powell jumped 8.95m at the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, Japan, during the World Athletics Championships. Beaman’s decades old jump, to this day, remains the second longest legal jump in history.

In short, the most decorated Paralympian in history is American swimmer Trischa Zorn-Hudson who, between 1980 and 2004, won 55 medals which, at the time of writing, leaves her 25 ahead of her nearest rivals, multi-talented Israeli athlete Zipora Rubin-Rosenbaum and Swedish sport shooter Jonas Jacobsson, in the all-time list. All told, Zorn-Hudson competed at seven consecutive Paralympic Games – Arnhem (1980), New York (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996),Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004) – and amassed a haul of 41 gold, nine silver and five bronze medals.

Born in Orange, California on June 1, 1964 and blind from birth, as the result of a rare genetic eye disorder, known as aniridia, Zorn-Hudson competed in the S12, SB12, and SM12 disability categories. Aniridia results in the coloured part of the eye, or iris, being underdeveloped or missing altogether and, almost invariably, other parts of the eye being underdeveloped.

At her inaugural Paralympics, in Arnhem, Netherlands, at the age of 16, she won seven gold medals and in New York four years later she won another six. For all her success elsewhere, it was the final medal of her career, a bronze behind Zhu Hong Yan of China and Patrycja Ewelina Harajda of Poland in the S12 100-metre backstroke event in the Athens Olympic Aquatic Centre on September 25, 2004, was the one she described as “most significant medal I won”. Her mother, Donna, had died from breast cancer the previous June and, aside from winning the medal she had hoped for, Zorn-Hudson also carried the American flag in the closing ceremony as, she said, “a tribute to my mom.”