Once again, Briton Sarah Storey won. And once again, it was against Frenchwoman Heïdi Gaugain. After dominating the road time trial, the Englishwoman won the road race on Friday 6 September. On a 71 km (5 laps) circuit around Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), she won in a sprint. A victory by the hair’s breadth, by the pedal stroke.
“I ran the race I wanted to and I’m happy to have run it that way. declared Heïdi Gaugain, 19, twenty-seven years younger than her rival. Once again, it’s nothing. I’m sorry! The end was what it is. She was stronger: there’s nothing to say… She did it, she didn’t panic. »
After having remained for a long time in the leading group, the two women, who are in C4-C5 (category that brings together cyclists with a low level of coordination deficiency on one side of the body or in the legs, to a moderate level of one leg, or the absence of limbs) broke away shortly before arriving, bathed in summer sunshine.
Sarah Storey, 46, is a legend in disabled sports, nicknamed the “Iron Lady” in her discipline. Born with a deformed left hand, she began swimming at the age of 10, in the north of England, near Manchester. A precocious child, her results were not long in coming. In 1992, she took part in the Barcelona Games and wrote the first lines of her record with two gold medals (100m backstroke and 200m medley), three silver medals and a bronze in the S10 category, the lightest handicap. She was 14 years old at the time.
Four years later, in Atlanta, USA, she added three titles to her collection. Suffering from repeated ear infections, she repeatedly missed the top step of the podium. Then, at the age of 26, she stopped competing.
“And why not paracycling?”Sarah Storey asked herself in 2004. Four years later, in Beijing, she won the road time trial and the individual pursuit on the track. In front of her home crowd in London in 2012, she triumphed: four Paralympic titles. Her face is displayed everywhere in the capital. She was ennobled and the British Crown even had stamps printed with her image. Sarah Storey then put her fame to the service of a cause she knows: breastfeeding of athlete mothers during competitions, a situation she experienced during the Rio Games in 2016. The insatiable “Dame Sarah” continued to race and to podium, shining in Tokyo and then in Paris, where she decided not to race on the track to concentrate on the road.
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