Ashford’s Callie-Ann Warrington was all smiles after storming to Paralympic silver in her debut Games.
Warrington, 24, was determined to crack the podium in her favourite 100m butterfly S10 event after a near miss in the freestyle final 48 hours earlier.
And she set a massive 1min06.41sec personal best to finish just behind team-mate Faye Rogers at La Defense Arena.
At the midway point Maidstone-born Warrington was leading Rogers, who won gold at last year’s World Championships in Manchester and was hot favourite to win again.
But she admitted she was hanging on at the end, Rogers overhauling her advantage in the final 20 metres.
“I spoke to my coaches and they were happy with the pace I went out on, they just said you need to come back a bit quicker. I delivered that and a PB is brilliant,” said Warrington, who is one of more than 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Programme, allowing them to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches and benefit from pioneering medical support – which has been vital on their pathway to the Paris 2024 Games.
“To be able to race against Faye is just everything,” she added. “We have been saying to each other the last couple of months ‘come on, we can get the one-two’. It was lovely to have her next to me.
“We are very good friends until we get to the blocks, then we are competitors, and it’s nice to be able to separate that. We are both very determined people.
“To be a Paralympic medallist is everything to me, standing on that podium seeing two British flags go up was the most amazing feeling. It was nice to hear our national anthem, too.”
Rogers is a former swimmer on the Olympic pathway missing out on the Tokyo team at trials in 2021. However, this final was held exactly three years to the day since a car accident that changed her ambitions from Olympic to Paralympic.
“We push each other on and Callie-Ann is such a supportive team-mate,” she said.
“I know she’s my biggest rival but as soon as that race finished, she was the first person I wanted to congratulate.
“We’re both still really young and it’s exciting what we can do in the next four years before Los Angeles.”
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