The final day of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games has left a bittersweet final aftertaste for the Spanish delegation. The athlete Elena Congost (Barcelona, 36 years old) was disqualified this Sunday for letting go of the rope of her guide, Mia Carol, a few meters from the finish line, when he was suffering from cramps in the last stretch of the race. Congost has charged against the judges and has said she is “devastated” by the referee’s decision. “I would like everyone to know that I have not been disqualified for cheating, but for being a person and “It’s because of that instinct that comes out when someone is falling. To help. To catch them and hold them,” said the athlete while crying after learning of the disqualification.
Congost and Carol had finished third in the women’s T12 marathon, but Carol’s cramps on the edge of the finish line caused the Catalan to release the rope to allow her to stop. The judges of the race disqualified her for having breached article 7.9.5, which states that any athlete who releases the lead of their guide before the finish line will be disqualified.
These were the fifth Games for the Paralympic athlete, who had not competed since Rio 2016 after a maternity break. “It’s sad because I also had to come from not having a scholarship and being in the lurch and that was one of my goals. I’m not going to get a scholarship again and be on the ADOP (Support for Paralympic Objective Sport) plan and they’ll leave me out of everything again when I think I’ve shown what I could do,” confessed the Catalan.
The other side of the coin on this closing Sunday was the silver medal won by athlete Alberto Suárez in the T12 marathon – with which Spain has reached 40 medals in total. Suárez (Oviedo, 46 years old), who already won gold in London 2012 and silver in Rio 2016, was unable to beat Tunisian Wajdi Boukhili, but he did win the silver medal finishing the race 1m 57s behind Boukhili.
The Spaniards have improved their performance this year compared to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, where they managed to win 31 medals, and they also surpass the last record, that of Tokyo 2020, where the Paralympic team collected a total of 36 medals.
This year, swimming has been the sport in which Spaniards have managed to get on the podium the most times. The Spanish delegation has won 15 medals in this discipline. Athletics is below this mark, with eight medals. In third place is road cycling, with five medals.
Triathlon, track cycling, wheelchair fencing, judo, table tennis, wheelchair tennis and shooting are the other sports in which Spaniards have managed to bite metal.
In this way, Spain ends its participation in the Paris 2024 Games with a medal count that includes seven golds – two less than those achieved in Tokyo 2020 – 11 silvers and 22 bronzes. A total of 40 with which the Spanish are placed in the seventeenth position overall in the Paris 2024 medal table, where China has placed first with 220 medals.
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