Summer Olympics 2012 London

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Bronze medallist Matthew Walker of Great Britain on the podium during the medal ceremony for the Men's 50-meter Freestyle S7 final on day 6 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games on Sept. 4.

 

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This is Best Olympics of Olympic history

 

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This is Best Olympics of Olympic history

No the 2010 commonwealth in New Delhi is even better, if you calculate how much India spend the games to India than London 2012. So, if you count the cost, The commonwealth game is better than Olympic. The more it cost, the better it is, this is the general rule.

 

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Karen Darke (L) and Rachel Morris of Great Britain ride during the Women's Individual H 1-3 Road Race on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at Brands Hatch on September 7, 2012 in Longfield, England.

 

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Rachel Morris of Great Britain rides during the Women's Individual H 1-3 Road Race on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at Brands Hatch on September 7, 2012 in Longfield, England.

 

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Rachel Morris and Karen Darke of Great Britain crosse the finish line at the end of the Women's Individual H1-3 Road Race on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at Brands Hatch on September 7, 2012 in Longfield, England.

Rachel Morris (l) bites her bronze medal with team mate (and 4th place) Karen Darke at the end of the Women's Individual H1-3 Road Race on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at Brands Hatch on September 7, 2012 in Longfield, England.



In the event Morris, who had ruled herself out of podium contention, was party to one of the moments of these Games, slowing as she approached the line in third place to link hands with her team-mate Karen Darke in a deliberate attempt to cross the line in a dead heat and thereby share the bronze. There was an additional gloss: this was the medal that would take Great Britain's total past 21, thereby surpassing the achievements of Beijing.

For a moment there was even a suggestion it might come off. Morris and Darke were recorded as finishing in the same time, 1h 43min 08sec, and suggested initially they would refuse to accept the bronze unless it was shared between the two. This, though, was never going to wash with the race officials, who decided in a photo-finish that Morris had crossed the line marginally in front and awarded her the medal. Albeit not before several paddock wags had suggested both athletes might stand to be disqualified for refusing to race, just as the Brownlee bothers had been warned before the Olympics against staging a dead heat in the triathlon. Which, on a sweltering Kent day that saw this grand, slightly rickety old track thronged with a bank holiday-ish crowd, and buoyed a by large and celebratory Irish contingent, might just have sparked a minor venue revolt.

"We wanted it together. We crossed the line with our hands together. So hopefully we'll get a medal each – that's the plan," Morris said. "We worked so hard together, so we'll both get on the podium together." It wasn't to be though. Darke, who is paralysed from the chest down after falling off a cliff aged 21, watched as Morris mounted the steps before returning to briefly drape the medal around her team-mate's neck in a lovely display of competitive generosity before all four fastest finishers – as opposed to the standard three – posed for the photographers. "They both rode out of their skins and we're just as proud of them," the team's director Chris Furber said, confirming that none of the coaching staff had any idea what the two athletes had in mind as they approached the finish having failed to catch the American pair of Marianna Davis and Monica Basico.

"We were expecting a sprint finish between the two of them for the bronze and even discussing which one we each thought was going to get it," Furber said. "Then with 150m to go it became apparent what was going to happen. It was just a really nice moment of friendship. They've been through a lot together in life and in training. As a coach you're entirely focused on medals and achievement but sometimes it's nice to see that at times friendship can take precedence over anything else in the sport."

Darke, who had already won silver in the H1-2 time trial, is unlikely to spend too long dwelling on what was, in the end, an entirely sensible decision to deny her a share of the bronze. After returning home to Inverness she will resume preparations for an expedition to the South Pole, having previously crossed Greenland's ice cap on skis, climbed Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and California's El Capitan, and hand-cycled all the way across Japan.

This is a Paralympic sport of relatively recent vintage, having been introduced at the Athens Games of 2004. It is a discipline imported from the hand-bikes first introduced in the 1980s for non-disabled riders, and rapidly adopted as a brilliant boon to cycling for those with impairments to their legs. Riders pedal and steer with their hands, reaching extreme three-wheeled speeds and providing at Brands Hatch not just the spectacle of the Morris-Darke hand-clasp finish, but a day of elite racing that delighted a substantial crowd ranged around the steeply banked spectating ravines of this rather ramshackle venue.

There is something deeply 1970s about Brands Hatch, a venerable track lodged in the green interior of Kent that hosted its last grand prix race a quarter of a century ago and still seems synonymous with an era of powerful aftershave, the James Hunt-esque medallion and the weekend machismo of the pre-modern racing circuit. Patched up, decorated with purple hoardings and fish and chip shacks and infused with a noticeably thirsty Irish contingent here to cheer on Mark Rohan in the H1 road race, the grounds had the air more of a well-stocked country fete than a high end Paralympic event.

On the track though it was an exhilarating afternoon, marked first of all by Rohan's boisterously received gold medal. Rohan was an inter-county Gaelic footballer before suffering serious injuries in a motorbike accident in 2001. A poster boy in Ireland for both the summer Games, he has delivered gloriously here, having previously won gold in the time trial.

After which the day's racing was rounded off by the spectacle of hand-cycling's reigning glamour boy, the extraordinary Alex Zanardi, who appeared to large, rolling cheers to compete in the men's H4 road race. Zanardi, of course, knows Brands Hatch rather well. A former Formula One driver, he lost both his legs in 2001 in a horrendous 220mph crash in a Champ Car race. Zanardi was resuscitated seven times on his way to hospital and lost vast amounts of blood but was up walking on prosthetic legs just months after the accident, even returning to motor racing in a specially adapted car.

Now 45, and having taken up hand-cycling initially to keep fit, he won gold in the time trial on Wednesday, returning to a track that as a racing driver he negotiated in F3000 and then in the World Touring Car Championship, finishing second and third but never previously first. But Zanardi won a second gold in 2hr 32sec.

His presence here leant a rather starry gloss as the shadows lengthened. Not to mention a reminder of the pure racing qualities of a sport that bears some similarities to motor racing with its emphasis on engineering refinements, attritional tactical elements and – for one day at least – a moment of Formula One-style collusion at the finish line that brought bronze for Great Britain and a gloriously memorable moment of camaraderie for those present in the stands.

 

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Monica Bascio of the USA (2nd), Marianna Davis of the USA (1st), and Rachel Morris of Great Britain (3rd) welcome 4th placed Karen Darke of Great Britain onto the podium at the end of the Women's Individual H1-3 Road Race on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at Brands Hatch on September 7, 2012 in Longfield, England.

 

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Waiting in a handbike sat Italian Alessandro Zanardi, the former Formula One driver, now a Paralympian with no legs, leading the H4 class time-trial. Behind him on the road was the last man out, the dominant man of recent years, Oscar Sanchez, the American five-time world champion. And, as close as they could get, waited a platoon of camera lenses, all trained on the Italian, all focused intently on one of the stories of the Games.

Zanardi watched the clock, waiting. He said "the butterflies were flying in my stomach" and as the seconds ticked and Sanchez did not show, he added, "I believed something magical was happening for me." And, at last, when he knew for sure that he was an Paralympic champion, he rewarded the cameramen. He was helped from his bike and sat on his stumps in the middle of the track. Then he raised his bike above his head with his right hand and pumped the air with his left.
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Some moment. Zanardi, of course, had been to Brands Hatch before, driving cars that went five times faster than he could manage yesterday, and never won a race. "To win," he said. "I've had to come back on a handcycle." What a way to conquer a racetrack.

It was 11 years previously, as he puts it, that he got his ticket to this victory. That was when he was a driver racing CART cars at the Lausitzring in Germany and was hit by another car at 350km/h and at such an angle that the nosecone of his car and one of his legs flew clean into the air. By the time he reached hospital, he had lost 75 per cent of his blood, and when he got there, they took his other leg off. And that is what he calls a "ticket".

The comeback is extraordinary. He not only managed to drive racing cars again, he set his sights on the London Paralympics. And now he is a Paralympic champion. He is an extraordinary spirit, too. "It's an amazing feeling," he said, many times, though he wondered also if he wasn't a little sad.

He describes the London Games as his horizon, and now he had arrived there, he said, "this is almost the last day of a great adventure".

"From Monday I will have to find something good or else life will become a little boring," he said.

 

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Dagmara Witos-Eze of Poland (L) in action with Pui Shan Fan of Hong Kong, China during the Women's Team Wheelchair Fencing on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at ExCel on September 7, 2012 in London, England.

 

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Dagmara Witos-Eze of Poland (L) in action with Pui Shan Fan of Hong Kong, China during the Women's Team Wheelchair Fencing on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at ExCel on September 7, 2012 in London, England.

 

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Jing Rong, Baili Wu, and Fang Yao of China celebrate winning the Gold Medal in the Women's Team Wheelchair Fencing on day 9 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at ExCel on September 7, 2012 in London, England.

 

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Veronika Juhasz of Hungary after her victory against Delphine Bernard of France during the Women's Individual Foil Cat A Preliminaries of the Wheelchair Fencing on day 6 of the London 2012 Paralympic Games at ExCel on September 4, 2012 in London, England.