2016 RIO PARALYMPIC GAMES
- Wednesday, September 7 – Sunday, September 18, 2016
- Swimming: Thursday, September 8 – Saturday, September 17, 2016
- Olympic Aquatics Stadium, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Prelims 9:30 AM / Finals 5:30 PM (local time)
- IPC World Records
- Live stream links: NBC / IPC
- Schedule/Results
Great Britain’s Oliver Hynd crushed his own S8 world record en route to Paralympics gold in the 400 free.
Hynd blew out the Paralympic field in Rio, going 4:21.89 and winning by almost four seconds. He also slid under his old world record by a wide margin. The former mark was a 4:23.76 set just two months ago in Great Britain.
That’s the second Paralympic gold medal for Hynd, who also won the SM8 200 IM back in the 2012 London Paralympics. Hynd was silver in this 400 free in 2012, finishing behind China’s Wang Yinan. Wang was only third in Rio, going 4:32.78. His Chinese teammate Xu Haijiao was 4:25.65 for second.
The 21-year-old Hynd is extremely well-decorated in international competition, with more than 20 major international medals. He won two golds and a bronze at the 2015 World Championships, and had the same haul at the 2013 edition of the World Championships. He won one gold, one silver and one bronze at the 2012 Paralympics in London.
I wish I could better understand what disabilities make one eligible for the Paralympics. 4:21 is pretty quick even for an able bodied person.
SwimSwam ran an article about that, maybe it was around the time of Trials earlier this year? If so, could you please give us the link to that? thanks.
It described the criteria for all the different categories, etc.
Here is one we ran a few years back: https://swimswam.com/para-pan-pacs-preview-decoding-s1-s14-classification-system/ The video is no longer online, but the body of the story still lays out the classifications
Thanks man. Helped.
the links in the swimswam article that Jared posted didn’t work. Here’s an article on the S8 classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S8_(classification) and here’s one on Sam Hynd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hynd