Paralympics Recap & Fun Facts

Paralympics Recap & Fun Facts

Write-up by Turnstone Sports & Rec Coordinator, Kevin Hughes

I hope you all were able to take in some of the Summer Paralympics this year. There were 1,200 hours of coverage through 13 days. That's 92 hours a day. There were 539 events happening simultaneously in 22 sports--crazy entertaining.

Few Fun Facts (click on the blue links to dive deeper)

New Sports: Badminton and Taekwondo

Sports Removed: sailing and 7-a-side football

Other Sports Considered: amputee football, power hockey, and power chair football (USA calls this sport power soccer)

4,403 athletes from 162 Nations, including a Refugee Paralympic Team

Most Gold Medals: China for the 5th consecutive games with 96 golds and 207 medals

USA finished 3rd with 37 golds and 104 total medals, the best finish since 2008 games

Podium Sweeps: There were a total of 5 times where one country had Gold, Silver & Bronze in one event. China achieved this 4 times (swimming events) while Italy did this once in track

Volunteers: Total of 186,101 applications (both Olympics & Paralympics) 30,000 originally were going to be City Volunteers where they helped provide tourism, transport and other logistics outside of the matches but that number became less for obvious reasons. 80,000 were Games Volunteers that provided the supported need to run the events. It appears that number also became less as around 10,000 volunteers reported to have backed out due to their concerns of COVID.

1st Time Countries: Bhutan, Grenada, Guyana, Maldives, Paraguay and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines all made their debut appearances at the Paralympic Games

The games were pushed back exactly 364 days...due to COVID and wanting to keep the same days of the week

19 Competition Venues and 2 non-competition venues (if you click on the link you can see detail of each venue)

It has been projected that 4.25 billion viewers watched this year's Paralympics

Final Glance on how athletes connected to Turnstone finished

Women's Goalball

Silver medal finish (Full Results - Full Game Replay - Highlights)

Loss 2-9 to Turkey in Gold Medal Match (Turkey also won at the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games)

USA played without starter Amanda Dennis due to injury

USA Men's & Women's Goalball has a combined 12 Paralympic Medals (7 for Women's)

USA defeated Turkey on Monday 4-3

Overall Performance: USA went 5-2 with 5 Matches decided by 2 goals or less

USA Men's Goalball

4th Place Finish (Full Results - Full Game Replay (starts at 100.42 minute mark) - Highlights)

Loss 7-10 vs Lithuania in the Bronze Medal Match

USA was only down by 1 with 4:13 left with score at 6-7

Lithuania won Gold at the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games

USA Cycling - H4 Division

Tom Davis finished 5th in both the time trial & Road Race

Time Trial- 41:14.12 at a 24 kilometer distance (just under 15 miles) (Full Results - Replay (129:39) )

Road Race- 2:31:47 at a 79.2 kilometer distance (little under 50 miles) (Full Results - Replay)