Paris 2024: Diaz wins triple jump bronze. ‘I’m happy, but I know I can improve’
“I saw so many people who have been by my side since the beginning of my journey, the Fiamme Gialle, Fabrizio Donato, all my coaches, my mother, who is here with me, I take her with me, I’m living a dream”. This is how Andy Diaz Hernandez comments on his bronze in the triple jump at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games to Rai microphones. “Obviously in the qualification I was a bit anxious to demonstrate because it was the first time I competed with the blue jersey, but today I let myself go. I saw this final as another race that I won – he continues -. I’m happy, obviously I’m happy, a medal is better than nothing, but I really see myself with the possibility of improving, so I have nothing left to do but wait for the next races”. “This has been a very difficult journey, I have learned so much from life, I have had people by my side who have helped me as a human being, not only as a sportsman, so this has only made me dream of doing what I had to do”, says Diaz who then adds laughing that his coach also told him that he had won a bronze medal twelve years after him, calling it destiny. “There is nothing left to do but improve it, right? This is the first, now we start, we start from here and in the next races for the blue jersey I am sure I will do even better”, concludes the Italian-Cuban athlete.
Paris 2024: Battocletti silver in the 10,000 meters. ‘This medal makes me smile a little, I still can’t believe it’
“This medal also makes you smile a little, let’s put it that way. I came to these Olympics with the desire to learn a lot and at the same time to test myself. My focus, as I’ve always said, was the 5000 because I was going really fast and the things that were going well, because I was happy”. This was said to Rai microphones by Nadia Battocletti, Olympic vice-champion in the women’s 10,000 meters. “In the last few weeks I’ve caused a couple of annoyances and pains, so they forced me to reduce the load – she continued -. Usually on average I arrive at the right mileage for the 5000, for the 10000 not even to think about it. This is my fourth race in the 10,000, and the approach was not easy, even after the 5000 I was very sick, for this I have to thank Carlo Ranieri and my medical staff, because I really had a lot of annoyance, a lot of pain. Because at a certain point dad looks at me and says ‘For me this is enough, you’ve already done a lot. Let’s not exaggerate, health is better’, only that I wanted to have some more fun. In fact I entered here with a smile, with a lightness, in the last meters the stadium was really imploding”. But it wasn’t easy, Battocletti continues, because “the warm-up didn’t go as I had hoped, after about ten/twelve minutes I started to feel pain in my tendon. Carlo quickly put some tape on me. And during the race, each lap it came off more and more, until it reached under my shoe and stayed under it. ‘Now what do we do?’, I thought. The pain was so bad, but I did one thing wrong in the 5000 and maybe it’s because we actually went so fast and maybe I couldn’t have done more. And it was the fact that when they break away, they break away hard, then they cut that pace in the last lap and so in the last 500 meters/600 meters I had my eyes open, I said ‘No, don’t get away from me now'”.
“I am really very happy, I have to thank my family, my staff, my medical staff, my sponsor, my sports group, the Fiamme azzurre, all the Italians who in these days have really filled me with messages of affection, happiness and lightheartedness and I have to thank my Cavareno who is giving me another evening, with a big screen – continues Battocletti -, really when they send me videos, when they send me children’s drawings, audio, it is something that really melts my heart”. “I am still in defibrillation, I do not understand well what happened. The last 100 meters were a hallucination, I followed perfectly the athletes who would have taken me away, the fastest athletes, for what they were on the inside. In fact I imagined my mother telling me to be careful, be careful not to fall, not to stay on the inside, on the last lap I was perpetually on the inside”, concludes the new champion.
Paris 2024: Athletics, a silver and a bronze in three minutes, joy for Battocletti and Diaz
An extraordinary Nadia Battocletti achieves the feat of winning the silver medal in the 10,000 at the Paris 2024 Games. After just three minutes, Andy Diaz also wins bronze in the triple jump, with Italy as the protagonist, and the fourth place in the 4×100, deposed three years after Tokyo, does not hurt much. Battocletti is the first athlete born in Europe to step onto the podium of the 10,000 meters at the Olympics after 24 years, when in 2000 it was the Portuguese Fernanda Ribeiro who won bronze after the gold in Atlanta. The middle distance champion takes the podium with the Italian record of 30:43.35 at the end of an extraordinary performance, with a start in the top positions, a central part where she maintained her distance, slightly detaching herself from the leaders, but always in control, to close with a final sprint, which gave her the joy of silver, after having grazed her in the 5000 on Monday evening that had seen her in third place for a couple of hours before returning to fourth in the rankings. The Kenyan Beatrice Chebet wins again (30:43.25) closely followed in the sprint by the Trentino trained by her father-coach Giuliano, while the Dutch champion and outgoing Sifan Hassan takes bronze (30:44.12). Two more Kenyans, Margaret Chelimo Kipkemboi (30’44″58) and Lilian Kasait Rengeruk (30’45″04), are off the podium.
The Cuban-born jumper crowns his long-chased dream of wearing the blue jersey and being a protagonist at the Games with a jump of 17.64 (+0.7) on his last attempt, improving by one centimeter his initial leap to 17.63 (-0.2), with which he remained in the podium zone for the entire race. He is an Olympic bronze medalist like his coach Fabrizio Donato who won it in London twelve years ago. Gold for Spanish European champion Jordan Diaz at 17.86 (+0.1), silver for Portuguese defending champion Pedro Pichardo with 17.84 (+0.2). Italy thus rises to three medals in athletics in this edition, after Mattia Furlani’s bronze in the long jump.
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