Greek Paralympians collect 13 medals including five golds
Thanasis Constantinidis will be Greece’s flag bearer in the closing ceremony of the 2016 Paralympics in Rio in the early hours of Monday (Greek time), after winning two of Greece’s 13 medals in the Games that concluded on Sunday.
Constantinidis won gold in shot put in the F32 category, breaking the world record three times in the process. He then went on to win silver in the club throw of the F31/32 category.
Grigoris Polychronidis, who carried Greece’s flag in the opening ceremony, also won two medals, in boccia: He finished second in the BC3 category’s individual competition, and landed bronze with the rest of the national team that was third in the same category. TheGreek team also included Nikos Pananos and Anna Ntenta.
Greece won a total of five golds, the other four coming from teenager Dimosthenis Michalentzakis in swimming’s 100 meters butterfly (category S9), from Che Jon Fernandes in shot put F53 with a new European record, from Pavlos Mamalos in powerlifting’s -107 kilos, and from Manolis Stefanoudakis in javelin F53/54.
The Greeks got two more silvers as Dimitris Senikidis was second in shot put F20 and Panos Triantafyllou lost in the final of fencing’s saber Category B, while there were three more bronzes from Dimitra Korokida in shot put F53, from Dimitris Zisidis in shot put F32 and from Dimitris Bakochristos in powerlifting’s -54 kilogram category.
Meanwhile Greece’s participant in archery Dorothea Pimenidou scored an amazing 605/700 record in qualifying at the women’s individual recurve, which is so good it means she will likely qualify to the next Olympic Games in Tokyo. That would make her the first ever Greek athlete to participate in both the Olympics and the Paralympics of the same year.
