Paralympic debutant Maurice Wetekam has secured the German team’s first medal in Paris. The 18-year-old, who was born with a deformity of his left arm, came third in the 100-meter breaststroke in the pool at the La Défense Arena. He swam a personal best time of 1:07.04 minutes, 1.76 seconds behind the winner Stefano Raimondi from Italy.
“Both my first medal, but also the first medal for the team in general, that’s an incredible feeling. I’ve never had such support,” said Wetekam. For him, it is the greatest international success after silver at the 2022 and 2023 World Championships.
A little later, the table tennis doubles Stephanie Grebe and Juliane Wolf missed out on gold. The duo lost the final against Wenjuan Huang and Yucheng Jin from China 1:3. Grebe/Wolf repeatedly lost leads, but still left the arena in Paris with a smile. “We were very close. With every minute that the game is gone, we are happy about silver. We can celebrate today,” said Wolf.
Their colleagues Valentin Baus and Thomas Schmidberger are also certain of leaving the French capital with at least a silver medal by reaching the final. They advanced to the final after a thrilling 3:2 win in sets against Abdullah Öztürk and Nesim Turan from Turkey and will play for gold there on Saturday (2 p.m.).