Kadeena Cox claims 400m title after cycling gold in Rio

Kadeena Cox is now a Paralympic gold medallist in both cycling and athletics after she won the T38 400m in a world record 60.71.

The 25-year-old Briton, who took bronze in the 100m earlier in the Games, won a tightly fought race with China’s Chen Junfei to go well inside the global mark of 62.12 set this year by Russia’s Margarita Goncharova. The next athlete was some way back – Brazil’s Veronica Hipolito clocked 63.14 for bronze.

Cox was an able-bodied 11.93 100m runner in 2013 – the year before she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It was two days after she competed in the Loughborough International in May 2014 that the Sale Harrier suffered a stroke which changed the course of her athletics career and she began the following year competing with the Rio Paralympics in mind. This was only Cox’s third race at 400m since her diagnosis and her time was a PB by more than two seconds.

The 25-year-old said: “I’m so happy and I’m so glad I managed to achieve it. I was sat praying in the call room saying, ‘please let me get it.’ I knew I was able to do it if I executed the perfect race, but I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. I just ran my heart out and I knew I was going to be strong in the back end. I left something there and when the Chinese girl came alongside me I started to get worried, but I knew I was going to be able to overhaul her.”

On her recovery from the cycling C5 time trial on Saturday, she said: “It was really tough – I was pretty broken. My body hurt, everything was hurting but the team behind me was amazing.”

Britain’s 16-year-old Maria Lyle ran one of her slowest times of the year as she tried to build on her world silver of last year, but her 14.41 was good enough for bronze in the T35 100m.

Winner Zhou Xia set a Paralympic record of 13.66. The 17-year-old Chinese athlete came through strongly after she and Australia’s Isis Holt, …

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