Sandra Mikolaschek didn’t feel at all comfortable in the lead role after her table tennis fairytale. Her successful teammates Valentin Baus and Thomas Schmidberger sang a serenade to the surprising heroine, “Oh, how beautiful it is” echoed through the Arena Sud 4. “I don’t really like being the person who is the center of attention,” said the 27-year-old shyly – but that’s what she did on the penultimate day of the competition. In the end, she won the long-awaited tenth gold for Team D.
As the riders were once again reliable, the swimmers continued their winning streak thanks to Gina Böttcher and Lindy Ave made it onto the podium after her maternity leave, it was a medal-rich day. And that was despite the prosthetic sprinter Felix Streng, who originally came second, being disqualified afterwards. The most tears of joy were shed by the wheelchair basketball players after their victory in the bronze medal match; in total, there were seven podium places for Germany on Saturday.
And the boss was actually already satisfied beforehand. “We are in a good position,” explained Karl Quade at the final press conference in the morning. Even if it will not be quite enough to make it into the targeted top ten in the medal table, the head of mission drew a generally positive conclusion. The team “caught up well” in the second half of the games.
The negative trend with the historic negative result in Tokyo has been halted for the time being, that was the main goal. In Japan, the German team finished twelfth in the medal table with 13 gold, 12 silver and 18 bronze medals, and the total number of medals has now already been exceeded at 46.