Elena Congost won bronze in the marathon at the Paris Games

A few minutes apart, while the Spanish delegation celebrated the silver of Alberto Suárez, a new medal came for the marathon team at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games who won the bronze medal in the T12 category to crown a magnificent performance in the queen. of athletics.

In 3:00:48, a personal best, Congost was third in a final with a Moroccan double. Fatima Ezzahra El Idrissi won with a world record of 2:48:36, with complete authority ahead of her compatriot Meryem En-Nourhi. Without suffering, Congost had no problem maintaining the third position where he moved for most of the race.

In this way, he added forty-one Spanish medals of the Paralympic Games. It’s a total that aims to stay at seven golds, eleven silvers and twenty-three bronzes, in a great final day of athletics to put the perfect end to this French event.

A French athletics event ends in a spectacular setting like Les Invalides, with fans gathered in the stands as the day wears on. Here, Congost was always in third position and from the start it knew that it could not keep up with its rivals and knew how to keep a cool head to maintain its own pace and rush towards the finish line.

El Idrissi always set the pace, ready to break the race from the start. This he did, as he was nearly a minute and a half ahead of El-Nouhri in the first five kilometers. The race situation was firmly in their favor, with Congost third, two and a half minutes from first position.

The positions never changed in a race that the three women on the podium faced alone. The differences between the respective chasers are always widening, but the order of the final podium is not in jeopardy. In fact, El Idrissi’s challenge was a world record of 2:54:13 by the Japanese Misato Michisita, which she broke with authority in her 2:48:36.

With El-Nouhri’s untroubled second, Congost always controlled the distance with fourth classified. So, he went for his 3:00:48 which was a personal record and, above all, a great bronze medal, a color he did not have in his extensive collection of metals.

A long-distance athlete in his early days and a marathon convert over the years, Congost, who is visually impaired, won bronze in that marathon at the Rio 2016 Games. silver at 1500 meters in London 2012. This bronze However, it has an additional merit: the Spanish athlete stopped her sports career to become a mother of four children. But he wanted to come back in a big way and he achieved it: on his return to the Games eight years later, he was a bronze medalist.