The Frenchman Timothée Adolphe won the bronze medal on Wednesday in the 400m T11, a category bringing together athletes with almost total visual impairment, offering a second medal to the Blues at the World Para-Athletics Championships at the Charléty stadium in Paris.
Adolphe (51 sec 21/100) was narrowly preceded by the Spaniard Gerard Descarrega (51 sec 18/100) and the new world champion, the Brazilian Felipe Gomes de Souza (51 sec).
What a day for Brazil! ????????????
Felipe de Souza stole the show in the 400m T11, after finishing first ahead the local star ????????Timothee Adolphe.
This was the 10th medal of the day for @cpboficialthe fifth world title! Now they are second at the #PARIS23 medals table.@wpaparis23 pic.twitter.com/mEtrLyarxo
— #ParaAthletics #PARIS23 (@ParaAthletics) July 12, 2023
The other French entrant in the event, Trésor Makunda, finished in fourth place (52 sec 38/100).
Although this is a second medal for the Blues – after the bronze gleaned by Manon Genest the day before in the long jump – the faces of Timothée Adolphe and his guide Jeffrey Lami were closed. “We came to defend a title at home,” said Adolphe, crowned in 2019 in Dubai. “It’s still a medal, we’re not going to spit on it, maybe we’ll savor it more afterwards but now it’s not what we came for,” continued the 33-year-old sprinter.
“We did what we had to do, it lacked a bit of freshness at the end,” analyzed Jeffrey Lami, as the duo was narrowly overtaken in the final straight by the Spaniard Descarrega. “We hoped to offer a better show to our families, the public, our partners, all the people who came to see us,” added Lami.
For his part, Trésor Makunda, despite the disappointment of a fourth place, promised that “in Paris (for the Paralympic Games), we will have to be counted on”. Before concluding: “It’s learning, we leave here with two personal bests. I am convinced that in Paris we will have learned the lesson”.
