By Christopher Gutierrez and Dereck Pinalez-Vera,
Staff Writers.
This year’s Paralympics had a lot of drama and attention surrounding the games. Australian swimmer Alexa Leary broke two world records in one day. She broke the first record in her first heat of the day. Leary’s world record time to win the Paralympic S9 race is 59.53. When asking senior Amy Rico about the event, she said, “It was interesting watching her because swimming isn’t an easy sport, and to swim with any sort of disability holding you back must be even harder and it’s amazing to see.”
Four-time Australian Paralympic swimmer Ahmed Kelly was given a scare when he was temporarily stripped of his silver medal after being accused of cheating, as it was said that he had done a butterfly stroke instead of a freestyle. It was Kelly’s return to the Paralympics after failing to receive gold in the same event at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. After seeing footage captured from cameras underwater, it was confirmed that Kelly did not do a butterfly stroke and he was given his silver medal back.
Poland’s Lukasz Ciszek was the favorite to win the archery shoot-off. However, things weren’t going according to plan for Ciszek after Harvinder Singh hit two nines in the Paralympic final and was in the lead by three points. After Singh hit a 10 to lead 4-0, a win for Ciszek looked as difficult as climbing Mount Everest. Singh won the shoot-off with a comfortable score of 6-0, and made history becoming the first ever archery gold medalist from India. This was a spectacular win for Singh, who was ranked 12th in the world with not many signs of reaching gold.
Grand news for the state of California. Since the beginning of the Olympics all the way up to Sept. 3, Olympians from California made up a decent percentage of medals won, especially gold. Out of the total of 71 medals won by team USA, around ten percent of them come from California, with a combined total of 7 medals. In terms of winning gold, the ratio is even better: Team USA won a total of 40 gold medals, and seven of them came from California — that’s around 17% of the gold medals won — showing how California puts up a good fight when going for gold.
