Fifth gold for Freney
Australia’s Jacqueline Freney won her fifth gold of the Games in the stand-out performance of the day, after a row involving sprinter Oscar Pistorius overshadowed the sporting action.
World record holder Freney, who has cerebral palsy, took gold in a new Paralympic best of 1:09.39s in the S7 100M freestyle to add to her titles in the S7 50M butterfly, S7 100M backstroke and SM7 200M individual medley.
Then with team-mates Ellie Cole, Madison Elliott and Katherine Downey, the 20-year-old added the women’s 4x100M freestyle 34 points relay, making it a clean sweep for the Aussies after the men’s team triumphed on Sunday.
In that race, Matthew Cowdrey bagged his 10th Paralympic title in a career spanning three Games, needing just one more gold to become his country’s most successful Paralympian.
Earlier Britain’s swim queen Ellie Simmonds won the women’s S6 200M individual medley in 3:05.39, breaking the world record she set in qualifying and adding to her S6 400M freestyle title.
The teenager, who has a form of dwarfism, won the 400M and the 100M freestyle in Beijing four years ago at the age of just 13 and has become one of the faces of the London Games. Poland’s Natalia Partyka -- one of only two Paralympians to compete at this year’s Olympics -- won gold for the third consecutive Games in the women’s singles Class 10 table tennis.
Partyka, who was born without a right hand and forearm, beat China’s Yang Qian 3-2, just weeks after she and Pistorius competed at the Olympics.
On the track, El Amin Chentouf of Morocco smashed the world best by more than 30 seconds in the T12 5,000M for visually impaired and blind athletes, finishing in 13:53.77.
Kenya’s Samwel Mushai Kimani, with guide runner James Boit, romped to a new world record of 3:58.37 in the T11 1500M, beating Brazil’s Odair Santos, who was also inside his previous world best of 4:03.66.
