PARIS, 4 Sep. (by EUROPA PRESS special correspondent Ramón Chamorro) –
Spanish cyclist Sergio Garrote said it was “incredible” to win the gold medal again in the H2 class handcycle time trial at the Paris Paralympic Games, which rewards his “work, sacrifice and effort” and that he had not expected “such a great superiority” over his two main rivals, Luca Mazzone and Florian Jouanny.
“The feeling is incredible, I feel great right now, this is magnificent, it is the reward for work, sacrifice, effort. Since April I have been concentrating with my family, with my wife, with my dog and training day after day under a hellish sun, under snow, under rain, at altitude, at sea level,” said a somewhat emotional Garrote after the test.
The Catalan praised “the ability to defend his Olympic title in the time trial against the host,” Floriant Joanny, who was going to be “a very tough rival,” and against the Italian Luca Mazzone, who “is the standard-bearer in his country and is one of the greatest figures in Italian sport.”
However, he beat both of them by a significant margin. “I didn’t expect that superiority to be so great. We had nothing more than references from kilometre 5 and what we could more or less sense visually,” he said.
“Félix (García Casas, coach) was already warning me that the penultimate rider who came out ahead of me, who was Luca, was in my visual space, but we had no idea how Florian was doing, but even so you can’t give up at any time and your only instinct and the only thing you know how to do is keep pedaling to the end as if you were a lion in search of its prey,” he added.
The Spaniard, who is celebrating the fact that his victory allowed him to defend the gold he won three years ago in Tokyo, stressed that “the two climbs on this circuit are not hard.” “I had already seen this in May and I already knew what I was up against and there is a motto that, together with my coaches, we have always said: you have to train above what you are going to compete with and always with the maximum suffering so that when this moment arrives everything is better. It has been very sweet, the truth is, it has been an incredible moment, I am very happy,” he stressed.
“Of course I enjoyed the finish line because I saw my fellow countrymen, I saw Spaniards, I heard ‘Go Garrote!’, that war cry I say to myself when you’re running out of strength and you have to pull only yourself together and keep encouraging yourself,” he said about the final meters of the time trial.