Coetzee ‘overwhelmed’ with silver
HAVING missed out at Rio 2016 and the 2017 world championships, Louzanne Coetzee expressed her relief at finally breaking her medal duck with silver at the Tokyo Paralympics yesterday.
It has been a long road for Coetzee, who has a visual impairment, to reach the heights that she did at Tokyo Stadium.
Running in the 1 500m T11 class, the 28-year-old was a bit concerned when Mexico’s world champion Monica Rodriguez Saavedra took the lead from Coetzee in the second part of the race.
But with her guide Estean Badenhorst, Coetzee negotiated the jostling for positions and managed to claim second place in a time of
four minutes 40.96 seconds, which was a new African record, with Rodriguez Saavedra setting a new world record to take gold in 4:37.40.
Coetzee increased Team South Africa’s medal tally to three, following the golds from Anrune
Weyers and Ntando Mahlangu on Saturday.
“I can’t believe it,” Coetzee said as the magnitude of her effort, winning Team SA’S third medal at these Paralympics, started sinking in.
“I have been competing for eight years and this is my first medal. I’m just overwhelmed. I couldn’t have asked for a better race, a better guide, better preparation. I’m just very thankful for how everything went down,” Coetzee told the Team SA website yesterday.
“There wasn’t much left in the tank at the end. I’m the kind of runner who, if I could keep up with the gold medallist, I would have. This is my limit – for now!”
Badenhorst said afterwards: “It’s all about teamwork, and we came here as the dream team, and we took a lot of inspiration from all of South Africa and all our family, and everybody. We could feel the energy, and we had everything that we had to give. It came on the track, and we are just very thankful and privileged and very happy for this result.”
Coetzee and Badenhorst will now get set for the marathon on Sunday.
SA president Cyril Ramaphosa congratulated Coetzee, as well as Weyers and Mahlangu, in a phone call yesterday.
But it was a difficult day for wheelchair tennis star Kgothatso Montjane, who went down 6-2, 6-3 to China’s Ziying Wang in the women’s singles second round.