Sprinter sizzles in the Tokyo furnace
NOT even Tokyo’s stifling humidity could stop Australia’s James Turner from his mission at the Paralympics.
Tokyo’s baking heat has been knocking runners out cold, including Turner himself, but not before the champion sprinter won gold.
A former Pararoo soccer international before he returned to athletics five years ago, Turner blitzed his rivals to win the T36 class 400m gold in a Paralympic Games record time of 52.80 seconds, well outside the world record he set at the 2019 world championships but still super-quick under the oppressive conditions.
“I’m feeling really good about my race,” he said.
“Not as fast as I would have liked to, but in this heat I couldn’t have asked much better than what I did. I got the result that I came out to get.”
Tokyo’s furnace-like heat has been causing serious health problems for a lot of Paralympic runners, including Turner.
Unlike his teammate Jaryd Clifford, who threw up on the track after his 5000m race last week, he did at least keep his breakfast down but still collapsed after crossing the finish line and was taken to the trackside medical centre, where he was treated with ice and water to cool down.
“The heat got the best of me today,” Turner said.
“I left everything out there on the track, well not quite. I almost (threw up) but managed to hold it in.”
Turner, who has cerebral palsy, won gold in the 800m in Rio in 2016 but is running just the 400m and 100m in Tokyo because his condition increases the risk of overheating in Tokyo’s extreme weather.
“It plays a part,” he said.
“The heat causes stress which increases tone for me and makes it harder to walk around. But everything combined does that.
“But I managed it. I did my job. There’s just so much emotion from it. To push that hard through a race, I almost tripped before the line. So pretty happy to get over the line.”
Although he’s just 25, Turner has already established himself as one of the brightest stars on the Australian Paralympic team.
A multiple world champion over 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m, he arrived in Japan under huge pressure to win and duly delivered.
“Most of the expectation comes from myself,” he said. “I have a lot more expectation that I will be able to perform at these meets now because I’ve done it before.”
Runner-up in the 5000m, Clifford won bronze in the 1500m run for visually impaired athletes, finishing less than a second behind Russia’s Anton Kuliatin and Tunisia’s Rouay Jebabli.
Clifford, who is legally blind, went into the race as the world record holder but without his guide, making tactics and navigation harder to work out. So while the winning time was well below his best, he said the clock didn’t matter because it boiled down to tactics.
“I would have liked to have gone quicker. I’m the world record holder but they’re only a second behind me, and if I lead it out, they’ll sit on me and they’re quick enough to do that so I was kind of in a pickle,” he said.
“I had to try and trust and back myself. I didn’t quite have it in that last lap compared to the other boys.
“People sometimes don’t understand this about distance running: athletes who hold world records, do they normally win world championships and major championships?
“It doesn’t happen a lot. That’s because it is not paced. All my quick times are paced, this was the opposite.”