Isabelle Foerder competes in her eighth Paralympics: A ray of hope in the rain

Rain is dripping onto the tartan track and the air is humid. But the Stade de France appears almost sunny on Friday thanks to the cheering of the crowd. The second day of the Paralympics in Paris and the starting signal for para-athletics.

In the cloudy weather, the 100-meter final in the T35 category with the German finalist Isabelle Foerder is a real ray of hope. The nine finalists are greeted in a moving atmosphere. Isabelle Foerder takes her position on lane number eight.

In Tokyo 2021, the now 45-year-old narrowly missed a medal and finished fourth. On the one hand, she was positively surprised by this placing. On the other hand, she was not completely convinced by her own performance. She said at the time that she would have liked to have finished in under 15 seconds. She narrowly missed this goal with a time of 15.32 seconds.

The cheers at the Stade de France

When the starting gun sounds on Friday morning in Paris and the race begins, the stadium is well filled despite the early hour – and the cheers are loud for the nine runners.

After just a short time, a clear gap became apparent between Foerder and the front of the field, led by the favorite from China, Xia Zhou.

Foerder, who lives with cerebral palsy, came in eighth. And with a final time of 16.36 seconds, she was well below her season best of 15.79 seconds. However, the athlete was not in a bad mood after the race, describing her experience with the word: “Awesome”.

“The atmosphere is great, you come in and are cheered, it’s just fantastic,” she says. But she wasn’t completely satisfied with her performance: “It was okay. But I would have loved to run under 16 seconds.” The favorite Zhou won the gold medal as expected – with a new season’s best of 13.58 seconds.

Waiting for the medal

In the men’s event, Phil Grolla of Wolfsburg missed the 100-meter final in the morning on his Paralympics debut with a time of 10.94 seconds.

Curiously, he and his competitors had to restart the preliminary heats – at the same moment as they started, Colombian José Gregorio Lemos had set a world record in the javelin throw. It was so loud and chaotic in the stadium that the officials decided to repeat the start.

Although Grolla missed the final, the experience means a lot to the sprinter: “It was a very special moment for me because I never thought I could be standing here.”

This meant that there was no German medal in athletics on Friday. However, Léon Schäfer and Jule Ross have the opportunity to win a first para-athletics medal for Team Germany on Saturday.