PARIS, 7 Sep. (by EUROPA PRESS special correspondent Ramón Chamorro) –
Spanish athletics ended its participation in the events at the Stade de France at the Paralympic Games on Saturday without being able to add more medals after José Iván Cano finished fifth in the F13 long jump and Adiaratou Iglesias finished fourth in the 400 metres T13.
The Valencian jumper arrived at the event encouraged by his silver medal three years ago in Tokyo 2020 and by his runner-up position in the world championship a few months ago, but he was unable to be with the best in a high-level final and with the podium with 7.20 metres or more.
Cano, on the other hand, had a best jump of 6.89 metres this season and his best ever was the 7.04 metres with which he won the medal at the Paralympic Stadium in the Japanese capital. On this occasion, he did not find his best form and his best attempt was 6.76 metres, far from the bronze of the Brazilian Paulo Henrique Andrade dos Reis with 7.20, the same record as the silver of the American Isaac Jean-Paul, while the gold went to the Azerbaijani Orkhan Aslanov with 7.29. The other Spaniard in the final, Winsdom Asisosa Ikhiuwu Smith, finished eighth with 5.98.
“Sometimes for one to win, another has to lose. And well, it’s obviously annoying, but what can we do? It was a spectacular competition, but I wasn’t training for anything less, I was there to be there, but I didn’t feel well during the race,” said the Spaniard in the mixed zone.
Cano said that he was “not” discouraged when he saw two rivals jump 7.20 metres because it is a distance that “today” he felt “capable of jumping”. “At first there were adjustment problems, then I don’t know what happened there with a jump that they had given me a zero, but there is no need to make excuses,” he said.
“I haven’t competed well and when you don’t compete well at the Games, in the end, you get beaten. You have to be self-critical, stop and think about how we can improve and, above all, looking ahead to the next cycle, try to find those changes that will lead us to achieve the objective, which was obviously to win a medal. I think that looking at it any other way is fooling ourselves. I haven’t competed well today and that’s it, I’ll do better, of course, another day. It’s a shame that it happened at the Games, but that’s how it is,” she concluded.
ADI IGLESIAS: “PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY I WAS FIT FOR WHAT WAS RIGHT AND NECESSARY”
In the other final of the morning session at the Stade de France, the 400m T13, held while this long distance competition was taking place, there were not as many expectations for Adiaratou Iglesias, despite the fact that the Galician had also won a silver medal three years ago.
However, without much preparation, the Spaniard was not able to be with the best, although she greatly improved her performance in the series and ran a second faster, finishing fourth with a time of 56.98, her best time of the season in another final, like the 100m, very fast and with a world record, by the Brazilian Rayane Soares da Silva with 53.45, putting an end to the American Marla Runyan’s record of 54.46 that had reigned for almost three decades (1995).
“We didn’t fall that far behind, I’m happy. It’s true that I was a bit tense and my mother had to give me a hug before I went into the call room. As I had qualified, it wasn’t really clear whether I would finish in the top six, but I had the support of a lot of people and when I went out I thought of her. I ran for myself and for all those people, to prove to myself that I can do it,” Iglesias confessed in the mixed zone.
The sprinter recalled that she had “no chance of winning a medal” because to do so she would have had to have run at her best times and after “a year of ups and downs, with things that had a lot of influence.” “Fourth place is gold for me,” she admitted.
In this sense, he explained that he had “lost a lot of weight due to personal problems” and “stress and stress”, but that his “mental health” was also quite “well”. “Physically and mentally, we can say that we were just about right and necessary and even so we have done more than we expected,” Iglesias concluded.
“I feel fine now, I’m not stressed anymore, and it’s true that the result wasn’t what I expected. It’s not that I don’t like it, but it’s true that I was expecting other things because I was prepared to win a medal at least in the 100m and we fell far short of that. In fact, I finished better and with a better time in the 400m, and I would have liked it to be the other way around. We hope that next year we’ll learn from all this and take the good things from it, like the experience, our teammates, our family and you in the media who are also with us all year,” she concluded.