PARIS: China’s Xie Siyi successfully defended his gold medal in the three-metre springboard diving at the Paris Olympics on Thursday while marathon swimmers took the plunge into the River Seine.

Xie, 28, finished on 543.60 points after delivering six near-perfect dives in Paris’ most competitive diving event yet, keeping alive China’s bid for a clean sweep of diving golds at the Games, with two more events to come.

Teammate Wang Zongyuan took silver while Mexico’s Osmar Olvera got the bronze medal. “I feel really thrilled,” Xie told reporters after the victory ceremony. “I rested for nearly two years since Tokyo and only came back last year. It has been really challenging for me.”

Earlier on Thursday, 24 women dived into the River Seine, which was deemed clean enough for competition, for the 10-kilometre swim through the heart of the city.

Sharon van Rouwendaal from the Netherlands won a gruelling battle against her competitors and a strong current in 2hr 3min 34sec, devoting her gold to the memory of her pet dog, Rio, who died in May.

“Swimming is my everything, but so was he... My father said: ‘swim one more time and do it for him. And that’s what I did’,” she added.

Water quality in the Seine has been in the spotlight during the Olympics despite a 1.4-billion-euro ($1.5-billion) effort to impr­ove sewerage and water treatment.

Organisers have been forced to scrap several training sessions and postpone the men’s individual triathlon after assessing the water to be too dirty to swim in..

There was home joy at a raucous National Velodrome when France’s Benjamin Thomas won gold in the track cycling men’s omnium despite a mid-race crash.

His victory came after New Zealand’s Ellesse Andrews sur­ged to gold in the women’s keirin.

INDONESIAN DELIGHT

Indonesia celebrated their first Olympic gold medal in a sport other than badminton when Ved­driq Leonardo won the inaugural men’s speed climbing event.

Leonardo, 27, improved his time with each race starting with the quarter-final, ultimately beating China’s Wu Peng by two hundredths of a second with a personal best of 4.75 seconds on the 15-metre wall.

“I feel very happy, very joyful,” he said. “My heart raced [in the competition], but I stayed focused and finished it.”

Chinese young gun Luo Shifang won the 59kg weightlifting title with a total of 241kg, setting Olympic records in the snatch and clean and jerk, while Iran’s Saeid Esmaeili won the men’s 67kg Greco-Roman wrestling gold.

At the Vaires-sir-Marne Nau­tical Stadium, New Zealand’s Lisa Carrington led her women’s kayak four crew to the gold medal, increasing her personal Olympic tally to six golds and one bronze.

Germany’s four-man kayak team edged Australia by four-hundredths of a second to take gold in their 500 metres finals race after China’s Liu Hao and Ji Bowen had powered to victory in the men’s canoe double in a time of 1:39.48.

Sailing events in Marseille saw reigning champions Ruggero Tita and Caterina Banti of Italy win gold in the mixed multihull while Austria’s Lara Vadlau and Lukas Maehr clinched gold in the mixed dinghy and Britain’s Ellie Aldridge won kiteboarding’s first ever Olympic gold.

HALL LANDS 400M TITLE

In a scintillating and dramatic race on Wednesday night, Quincy Hall produced an incredible late surge to overhaul Briton Matthew Hudson-Smith and take a first men’s Olympic 400 metres gold for the United States since 2008.

Long-striding Hudson-Smith seemed on course to win his country’s first gold over the distance since “Chariots of Fire” Eric Liddell in the Paris Games 100 years ago, but Hall swept past to win in a personal best 43.40 seconds and give the U.S. their first triumph since LaShawn Merritt in Beijing. Zambia’s Muzala Samukonga took bronze.

“I don’t give up,” said Hall. “I just got grit. I grind. I got determination. Anything that I can think of, that’s what gets me to that line. I think of all the hurt, all the pain.”

In other athletics action in the Stade de France Morocco’s Souf­iane El Bakkali joined an elite group of Arab double gold winners by taking his second consecutive 3,000m steeplechase title.

Only his Moroccan compatriot Hicham El Guerrouj, who won 1500m and 5,000m gold at Athens 2004, and Tunisian swimmer Oussama Mellouli (1500m freestyle in Beijing 2008 and 10km marathon in London 2012) have achieved the feat.

Jamaica’s Roje Stona achieved an upset men’s discus win and Nina Kennedy took Australia’s first ever pole vault Olympic title.

LIN EASES INTO FINAL

Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, one of two boxers at the centre of a gender dispute at the Paris Olympics, moved a step closer to the Olympic title when she beat Turkey’s Esra Yildiz by unanimous decision in the women’s featherweight semi-finals.

After the decision came through, the Turk made an X sign with her fingers, just as another of Lin’s beaten opponents had done in a previous bout.

Kahraman refused to say afterwards what it meant. In most cases, males have both an X and Y chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes.

Lin’s win came 24 hours after Algeria’s Imane Khelif reached her final. Lin and Khelif are competing in Paris despite being disqualified from the world championships last year by the Inter­national Boxing Association (IBA) after reportedly failing gender eligibility tests.

Also on Wednesday, Panipak Wongpattanakit became the first person from Thailand to win two gold medals when she defended her Tokyo title in the taekwondo women’s flyweight division against China’s Guo Qing.

Panipak, who now plans to retire, won 6-3 2-3 6-2, clinching the victory with two kicks to the head, which yielded three points each.

Medals table

(Tabulated under country, gold, silver, bronze and total)

China 28 25 18 71

USA 27 36 34 97

Australia 18 14 11 43

France 14 18 21 53

Great Britain 13 17 21 51

South Korea 12 8 7 27

Japan 12 7 13 32

Netherlands 11 6 7 24

Italy 10 11 9 30

Germany 9 7 5 21

Canada 6 5 10 21

New Zealand 5 6 2 13

Ireland 4 0 3 7

Romania 3 4 1 8 Ukraine 3 3 4 10

Cuba 2 1 3 6

Iran 2 1 2 5

Azerbaijan 2 1 1 4

Belgium 2 0 4 6

Hong Kong 2 0 2 4

Philippines 2 0 2 4

Serbia 2 0 0 2

Israel 1 4 1 6

Kazakhstan 1 3 3 7

Jamaica 1 3 1 5

Poland 1 1 4 6

Kenya 1 1 3 5

South Africa 1 1 2 4

Argentina 1 1 0 2

Chile 1 1 0 2

Ecuador 1 1 0 2

Saint Lucia 1 1 0 2

Uganda 1 1 0 2

Chinese Taipei 1 0 5 6

Uzbekistan 1 0 2 3

Algeria 1 0 0 1

Botswana 1 0 0 1

Bahrain 1 0 0 1

Bulgaria 1 0 0 1

Dominica 1 0 0 1

Slovenia 1 0 0 1

North Korea 0 2 3 5

Mexico 0 2 2 4

Armenia 0 2 1 3

Kosovo 0 1 1 2

Portugal 0 1 1 2

Tunisia 0 1 1 2

Colombia 0 1 0 1

Cyprus 0 1 0 1

Fiji 0 1 0 1

Mongolia 0 1 0 1

India 0 0 4 4

Tajikistan 0 0 3 3

Dominican Republic 0 0 2 2

Malaysia 0 0 2 2

Moldova 0 0 2 2

Cabo Verde 0 0 1 1

Egypt 0 0 1 1

Grenada 0 0 1 1

Peru 0 0 1 1

Slovakia 0 0 1 1

Zambia 0 0 1 1

Updated to 11:30pm (PST)

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2024