You might need to hold your nose before you jump into the Seine, but it was pretty fine taking a walk along its banks yesterday (Thursday) as Jemima Montag kicked off the Australian athletics team’s medal hunt with a bronze in the women’s 20km road walk.
An early morning thunderstorm will have done nothing for the water quality, and the threat posed by lightning strike caused a 30-minute delay to the men’s 20km event which preceded the women’s. It also pushed both races closer to the middle of the day heat the French capital is experiencing.
The heat level was moderate – low 20s for most of the two races – but the humidity was up over 90 percent most of the morning. Can one get an iced latte in a Parisian café, I wonder.
Yang Jiayu, the world record holder, shared this year’s world lead with her Chinese teammate Ma Zhenxia coming into the Olympics. Maria Perez of Spain won both the 20km and 35km at last year’s world championships in Budapest. Montag was second in the 20km in the Hungarian capital and ambitious to claim an Olympic medal in Paris.
All three women would play a huge role in the Olympic race, but each chose a distinctly different approach to the race. Yang was aggressive from the off, building a lead in the first few hundred metres of the 1km lap while everyone else was distracted perhaps by the view of the Eiffel Tower.
In any case, within a kilometre a lead pack had formed and it seemed the race was set for the sort of attritional battle endurance fans are so familiar with at championship level.
Yang, thank heavens, had other ideas. She stayed with the pack through five kilometres before hitting the accelerator in the sixth. Her lead grew steadily, six seconds at 6km, 12 at 7km, 16 at 8km and all the way out to a maximum of 44 seconds at 13km. What interest there had been in matching her move had now evaporated. It became a case of waiting for the right moment to launch a counter.
Perez was first to lose patience. Accompanied by Ma, at first she stemmed the bleeding. But taking six and then eight seconds off the lead didn’t put too much of a dent in it, especially as Yang looked comfortable all the while. But a chunk of 10 seconds in the sixteenth 1km lap, followed by another 10 in the seventeenth, raised the temperature just as dramatically as the appearance of clear skies and bright sun.
A last-ditch effort in the penultimate lap brough the Spanish athlete within 17 seconds, but that was as close as she got.
Now it was up to Montag who had bided her time before surging with 3km to go. She was fastest through the eighteenth and split the other two on the nineteenth. Suddenly she was only five seconds down on Perez and within 22 of the leader. Seemingly out of the medals as the chasing pack was split by Perez’s move, suddenly there was a glimpse of gold in the distance.
Not to be, alas. Perez and Montag had both made their challenges and both fallen short. Yang pretty well dashed across the Pont d’lena, the bridge linking the iconic Trocadero to the left bank, finishing as fast as she had started with a 4:07 kilometre to take the gold medal in 1:25:54. Her final surge took her to a 25-second margin over Perez who took the silver medal in 1:26:19, six seconds ahead of Montag.
Montag now has an Olympic bronze to go along with her world championships silver. She announced herself with a win in the Commonwealth 20km on the Gold Coast six years ago and had progressed steadily – tenth in the Doha 2019 world championships, sixth in the Tokyo Olympics, fourth in the Oregon world championships and second in Budapest. There may be a ‘what if’ about her race plan in Paris, but she executed it brilliantly and was in a position to strike in the last lap. Perez went earlier and didn’t get to the leader either.
Yang was just too good on the day. But Montag was bloody good, too.
Ecuador’s Brian Daniel Pintado evoked memories of when his predecessor Jefferson Perez was amassing three world championship victories and an Olympic gold as he ruled the 20km road walk. Brazil’s Caio Bonfim tried a less extreme version of Yang Jiayu’s race plan as he went to the lead in the second half of the race.
Pintado reeled the Brazilian back in and broke away in the final lap to win by 14 seconds in 1:18:55. Spain’s dual world champion from last year, Alvaro Martin, took the bronze medal.
Australians Declan Tingay and Rhydian Cowley were always prominent but neither could remain in medal contention in the closing stages. Tingay was eleventh, Cowley twelfth.
In all, a pleasant morning along the Seine. The Stade de France awaits on day two.
