Nora Meister wins her second medal at the Paralympics. The 21-year-old from Aargau takes silver in the 400 m. But the big celebration will have to wait.
Chantal Cavin's phone must have rung at some point on Friday. The 46-year-old former top swimmer, who has competed in the Paralympics three times, is a good friend of Nora Meister, so she always has an open ear for the woman from Aargau. Even before a race in the 400 m crawl at the Paris Paralympics, when the 21-year-old is almost bursting with nervousness.
Because Meister knows that she not only has a chance of winning a medal in her favorite discipline, she also wants to win a medal at all costs. Like in 2021, when she was able to fulfill a childhood dream by winning the bronze medal in Tokyo.
But as soon as the swimmer from Lenzburg jumps into the pool at La Défense Arena in the north of Paris, none of this nervousness is visible. Meister initially fought a duel for a few centimetres with the Brit Maisie Summers-Newton, but the Swiss athlete was able to hold on to second place. At the last turn, says Meister, she realized that silver could be enough.
Closer to the Chinese than expected
In the end, she swam with a reserve of five seconds. She loses four of them to gold medal winner Yuyan Jiang. Only four seconds. Meister would have thought that the Chinese swimmer, who had lowered Meister's former world record in this discipline in Tokyo 2021 by around eight seconds, would pull away more clearly.
But that doesn't mean that the athlete from Aargau is now worried about not winning gold. On the contrary. "I knew that I had the potential to win silver. I'm over the moon that it worked out," says Meister, who, however, cannot already start celebrating extensively, as her schedule dictates.
On Saturday morning at 9.30 a.m. she will be competing in the 100 m backstroke. That's why she has booked a hotel room right next to the arena for one night. "The bed in the hotel is much more comfortable than the one in the Village, so I'm sure I'll sleep well," she says. And she will also be much less nervous at the start. Because she has already achieved her big goal.
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