Key events
Australia are cheering on Chelsea Gubecka and Moesha Johnson in this gruelling 10km event but there are plenty of Aussies chasing glory on Day 13.
Of course the bigger issue for competitors hasn’t been getting a serving of E.Coli with their broccoli or bumping into a “Seine Cigar” it has been the turbulence of the currents which have proved unexpectedly powerful. These swimmers are swimming with the current but as they hit the first turn, the return leg will find them stroking against it.
This is when tactics come into play. Although most of these competitors are heading for the reed-fringed river’s edge and the walls of the Seine to nullify as much of the current as possible, the swirling undertow is already having an impact on the pack. It took about 6.5 minutes for the first leg but the race pace has now slowed noticably and swimmers are digging deep to essentially swim uphill.
Time for some live Olympic action! The women’s 10km swim is about to splash down in the Seine. As has become the custom, Paris’s most controversial venue has endured a barrage of testing for water quality. But under sunny skies, organisers have confirmed that bacteria levels in the river are at a level that is considered safe for the athletes. And so the swimmers are on their marks and ready to paint the town brown…
The skateboarding events at these Games have features some of the youngest (and sweetest) athletes in competition. In this world of pimply prodigies, 51-year-old Andy Macdonald is a glorious anomaly. The “Rad Dad” and Team GB skater ruthlessly crushed a 12‑year‑old boy to qualify for these Games and provided endless entertainment iun competition despite missing the men’s park final yesterday.
As Barney Ronay says:
By the end, watching him work the crowd, beaming unstoppably, it was hard to avoid the sense he was representing another nation here. And that nation is the nation of 51-year-old men in cargo shorts.
When Gustave Eiffel began cobbling together the 2,500,000 rivets and 7,300 tonnes of iron required for Paris’s most famous landmark, he wanted it to embody
not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the 18th-century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France’s gratitude.”
Hosting beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower wasn’t on Gustave’s wishlist but the event has been a magnificent success. In tonight’s women’s semi-finals, the Brazilians will face Australian’s Mariafe Artacho del Solar and Taliqua Clancy – silver medalists at the Tokyo Games three years ago – while the Canadians take on Nina Brunner and Tanja Hüberli of Switzerland.
For the USA, the event hasn’t gone to plan…
For every rise there’s a fall and these Olympics have given us plenty of spills amid the chills. One of the scariest came last night when Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma, the world record holder in the 3000m steeplechase, suffered a terrible fall in the Olympic final.
Girma hit his head on the track after his knee clipped a barrier on the final lap. The crowd at the Olympic stadium held their breath as the Tokyo siulver-medallist then lay motionless before being put in a neck brace and taken off on a stretcher by medics.
Team GB’s Matt Hudson-Smith missed out on a 400m gold medal yesterday by just four-hundredths of a second. The bittersweet finish was magnified by the fact it would’ve been the first British gold in the men’s 400m since “the Flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell in 1924, a race made even more famous by its depiction in the 1981 classic Chariots of Fire.
While it was a golden Day 12 for Australia, Team GB enjoyed a day of silver linings.
That victory was all the more special for the incredible odyssey endured by the Australia team’s coach Tim Decker who has overcome more than most to steer the cyclists in his charge to great heights on and off the track. Tim told Kieran Pender:
For me, coaching has always been about more than writing a program on a bit of paper. Coaching is the connection and belief you instil in your athletes. Coaching is not shying away from challenges, making a result happen that an athlete thought wasn’t possible.
One of the great boilovers of these Games came at the velodrome yesterday when the Australian men’s team pursuit pipped Team GB for gold in one of Olympic cycling’s greatest events. As Kieran Pender so vividly described, both teams traded millisecond-long leads in a high-speed, high-pain duel to the finish that ultimately delivered Australia’s first track cycling gold since 2012.
It is a race of extreme endurance, across 4,000 painful metres. It is a race where man and machine combine – with the aerodynamic benefits of equipment as closely scrutinised as individual training plans. It is a race where seconds are measured to the third decimal, to the single millisecond. And it is the race where, at long last, Australia are Olympic champions.
One of the great things about Olympic Games is how they inspire fascinated spectators like you and I. Amidst all the gold medal-winning journalism and elite photography, the champions at The Crunch gift us amazing data visualisation about the Paris Games.
Much is made of the athletic feats of competitors at these Paris Olympics. Not so much about the mental agility and psychological resilience required to scale such heights.
Jess Thom, the lead psychologist for Team Great Britain, told the Guardian’s Madeleine Finlay how she prepares her athletes for failure and success – and the challenges that arise when the games are over and they have to return to normal life.
Simon Burnton reckons these are the other Day 13 highlights to look for…
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Climbing
This is the last day with men and women in action. The women’s boulder and lead semi-final will be followed by the men’s speed final (the one event for each gender in Tokyo, combining all three disciplines, has since fissured into two). Since 2021 speed climbing has got a lot, well, speedier: the men’s world record has been broken 11 times since then, with Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo becoming the first person to go under five seconds last year and the USA’s Sam Watson bettering that mark twice on a single day in April. -
Track cycling
Two of the great velodrome events conclude today, with the quarter-finals, semis and final of the women’s keirin – where riders follow a speed-controlled electric bike for a few laps before launching a wild sprint for the line – breaking up the four events of the men’s omnium, each of greater drama than the last, concluding with the brilliant, chaotic, bewildering and wonderful points race. The schedule is reversed, with men’s keirin and women’s omnium (plus the women’s sprint finals), on Sunday. -
Athletics: women’s 400m hurdles
The anticipated showdown between Femke Bol of the Netherlands and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the USA, the two fastest women of all time over this distance, could be one of the highlights of this year’s athletics competition. The American spent 2023 focusing on the flat and returned to the hurdles in Atlanta in May with the fastest time of the year so far, a mark that Bol beat 12 days later. Bol has also impressed on the flat in the last couple of years, breaking the world indoor record twice, but this is where they are best.
The medal tally shows 72 nations have stepped onto the podium at the Paris Games.
So what can we look forward to on Day 13?
Here are the medal events in play today (all times AEST)
15:30
🥇 Open Water Swimming Women’s 10km
🥇 Open Water SwimmingWomen’s 10km
20:54
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Small Final
20:57
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Big Final
21:30
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s C2 500m Final A
🥇 Canoe SprintMen’s C2 500mFinal A
21:40
🥇 Canoe Sprint Women’s K4 500m Final A
21:50
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s K4 500m Final A
22:00
🥇 Hockey Men Bronze Medal Match: India v Spain
23:00
🥇 Diving Men’s 3m Springboard Final
🥇 Weightlifting Women’s 59kg
To be rescheduled – Sailing Mixed 470 Medal Race & Mixed Nacra 17 Medal Race
Preamble
Hello everybody and welcome to live coverage of the 13th official day of competition at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
If Day 11 belonged to the USA, with Gabby Thomas and Cole Hocker excelling on the track and Amit Elor winning on the mat, then Day 12 was all Australia. The wizards from Oz surged to 18 gold on the back of a new record for most gold medals in a single day.
What made the green and gold army’s four-gold strike all the more remarkable was the diversity of disciplines from whence it sprang. There was gold in the field, gold at the skate park, gold on the high seas and gold inside the velodrome.
Already sitting third behind the superpowers of US and China, it extended Australia’s lead over France (13 gold) and Team GB (12) and lifted the dynamos from Down Under to the greatest gold medal tally in its history.
