Chinese gold medallist Zhou Xia (centre) during the women's T35 100m final athletics event at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris on August 30, 2024, during the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. (Photo by Julien De Rosa / AFP)
Paris: China began to exert its traditional dominance at the Paralympics in Paris on Friday, pulling ahead of second-placed Great Britain despite a double gold medal success for British swimmers.
The Chinese, who have topped the medal standings at every Paralympics since Athens in 2004, finished the second day of competition with 12 golds, a performance that included three golds on the first day of the athletics programme.
Britain have six golds after Tully Kearney, who has cerebral palsy, and Maisie Summers-Newton both defended their titles from the Tokyo Paralympics three years ago.
Kearney won the women's 100m freestyle in the S5 category while Summers-Newton, who was born with achondroplasia, a condition that affects bone development, came home first in the women's 200m individual medley SM6.
"I was really nervous, it's something that's come from Tokyo," Summers-Newton, a qualified primary school teacher, told reporters.
"There's a lot of pressure being Paralympic champion."
Earlier, Zhou Xia won China's first gold medal of the athletics events when she sprinted to the women's T35 100m title, for competitors with impaired coordination, in a time of 13.58sec.
Di Dongdong added the men's long jump title for athletes with visual impairment by smashing the world record with a 6.85m jump and Wen Xiaoyan added a gold in the T37 women's 200m.
In front of an enthusiastic Stade de France crowd of around 45,000 in the evening session, Brazil's Petrucio Ferreira dos Santos, the fastest Paralympian in the world, won a third consecutive 100m title in the T47 class in a time of 10.68sec despite a track dotted with puddles.
Ferreira, who at the age of two lost his left arm below the elbow in an accident with a grinding machine, won gold medals in Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 and smashed the para-world record in 2022 when he posted a time of 10.29sec.
"I'm happy, lightning has struck for the third time at the Paralympic Games and I'm coming home with another medal," Ferreira said.
"That's three golds now at the Paralympics. It's an emotion that's hard to describe."
His compatriot Julio Agripino dos Santos had earlier kicked off the athletics programme by winning the men's T11 5,000m gold with a guide runner in a world record.
