PARALYMPIC GAMES: THE DELUGE is showing no sign of drying out. The Irish Paralympic team added another two medals to their increasingly grand total here last night, with an equestrian bronze for Helen Kearney and another for discus thrower Orla Barry in the Olympics Stadium.
It brings the tally after six days of competition to 10 – five of them gold – leaving Ireland in 14th place on the medals table.
Few teams here have cleared the bar of expectation at the Paralympics with anything like the heights reached by the equestrian team and their outstanding run of form at these games continued yesterday with another medal for Kearney of Dunlavin, Co Wicklow.
Already with a silver medal to her name from Sunday’s individual championship test as well as a team bronze, this time she took another bronze in the freestyle test on her horse Mister Cool.
Her score of 78.45 marks was only just bettered by silver medallist Laurentia Tan of Singapore and they both had to give way to one of the true stars of the games, British triple gold medallist Sophie Christiansen.
“This is my first games and to come away with three medals, I can’t even put it into words,” said 23-year-old Kearney afterwards.
“It’s just amazing. I didn’t really know what to expect today. I knew that Sunday’s test, the individual championship test would be my strongest one.
“I won a bronze in it in the European Championships in 2011 and topped it up with a silver the other day. Today, I couldn’t be happier. I just missed out in the Europeans so to come away with a bronze is just amazing.”
The very last act on the very last day of action at the Greenwich Park equestrian venue was the presentation of the team medals and it was apt that the Irish team was able to come together one last time to collect their bronze.
It brought to three the number of medals they were bringing away from Greenwich, when their main hope beforehand was to secure one.
“The team have worked so hard,” said Kearney.
“It’s an absolute testament to the hard work we did that we’re coming away with the bronze medal. We were in sixth after the team test and to bring ourselves up to the bronze medal position is a phenomenal achievement.”
For Barry, this was payback at the end of a long road. Although still a couple of weeks short of her 23rd birthday, she has been competing internationally since she was 16 and came fifth in the F57 discus competition in Beijing four years ago.
Her throw of 28.12 metres last night had her in first place for much of the evening and sent her into the final in third, just 32cm ahead of Algeria’s Nadia Medjmedj.
When Medjmedj couldn’t improve with any of her three throws in the final, Barry was guaranteed bronze. She still had three more throws herself but didn’t manage to find the extra length that would have changed the colour of her prized medal.
