Para canoe
The last day of the Parakanuten competition was a successful one from a German point of view. After silver at the Parakanu premiere in Rio 2016, Edina Müller has now been crowned Paralympics winner. Felicias Laberer was also able to look forward to a medal at her first Paralympic Games. Anja Adler was fourth in her class.
Müller had shone with a Paralympic record in the run-up to class KL1 and secured a place in the final. There, the Hamburg woman took the lead after a few meters, but faced tough resistance from the Ukrainian Maryna Maschula. In the final sprint, however, she was unbeatable and improved her own record from the prelim by over two seconds to 53.958 seconds. Maschula took silver, bronze went to Chilean Katherinne Wollermann.
“It really is indescribable!”
Edina Müller after her Paralympics victory
Joy only after official confirmation
“Today everything went well. I got away from the start well and pulled through the race. I rarely see what’s around me because I’m in the tunnel like that. But today I noticed that I was first. I waited anyway until it was on the monitor before I was happy, “said the 38-year-old afterwards.
Müller wins gold in two sports
With this, Müller copied her colleague Annika Zeyen and won gold in a second sport at the Paralympic Games. Together with the Bonn native, she triumphed in wheelchair basketball in London in 2012. After changing sport in Tokyo, Zeyen won the handbike title.
Müller is the only German athlete to have offspring in Japan, her two-year-old son Liam. Therefore, the paraplegic canoeist had to live in a hotel outside of the Paralympic village in Corona times and thus make extra efforts. “The conditions for us were really not perfect, that would have been better. But we somehow organized ourselves and managed to give me 100 percent,” she said of the situation. Before coming to Tokyo, she had to fight for a long time to be able to take her son with her at all.
Laberer with medal at their premiere
For Felicia Laberer, her first Paralympics could hardly have gone better. She came third in the finals of class KL3 and can look forward to a bronze medal. Already in the semifinals she showed how strong she was. After a perfect start, the Paralympics debutante couldn’t be pushed out of the lead and won in 51.049 seconds. She also kept up well in the finals, only Laura Sugar from Great Britain and the French Nelia Barbosa were faster.
Adler just missed the top 3
However, Anja Adler, who won the European Championship title in her class KL2 this year, missed a place on the podium. As the first of her semi-finals, she made it to the finals, but had to admit defeat to the favored Britons Charlotte Henshaw and Emma Wiggs as well as Katalin Varga from Hungary. One and a half seconds behind the medal ranks, she finished fourth (54.155 seconds). The woman from Halle has been completely paraplegic since she fell into a 15-meter-deep pit in a disused mine as part of her doctoral thesis in geology.