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London 2012 Athletics Results Book

The London 2012 track and field events were outstanding, not just in terms of athletic performance but also by the fact that every single session was played out in front of a capacity 80,000 crowd in the Olympic Stadium.

As expected China was the dominant force taking home a total of 86 medals, including 33 golds from the 170 different medal events.

Star performer for the Chinese was F40 thrower Zhiming Wang who took home gold in the discus, javelin and shot put events all with world record throws.

Host nation Great Britain also performed admirably finishing third in the medals table wining 11 gold, 7 silver and 11 bronze medals.

David Weir cemented his position as one of the best wheelchair racers of all-time winning four thrilling T54 racers to take top podium spot in the 800m, 1,500m, 5,000m and marathon.

In fact it was ‘Thrilling Thursday’, the night Weir won 800m gold, that will go down as one of the most talked about nights in Paralympic sporting history, partly due to the success of the home nation.

Tunisia’s Mahmoud Khaldi set the tone for an amazing night of athletics smashing the world record in the first event of the evening session, the men’s 400m T12.

This was soon followed by a second gold of the Games for Great Britain’s Hannah Cockcroft in the women’s 200m T34.

Weir then took 800m T54 gold by a whisker ahead of Swiss rival Marcel Hug in a race that worked the capacity crowd into an absolute frenzy.

The hardest task of the night was then left to the stadium announcer who had the enviable job of trying to silence the extremely vocal and supportive crowd in time for the men’s 100m T44 final, a race that had been talked about for years.

Amid chants of ‘Pea-cock, Pea-cock, Pea-cock’ for home crowd favourite Jonnie Peacock and the sight of thousands of flash bulb cameras going off at the same time, the race lived up to the hype.

World record holder Peacock stormed to gold in a Paralympic record of 10.90 seconds, a victory that not only secured the 19 year old front page of many newspapers the following day but secured his place as a household name.

South Africa’s defending champion from Beijing, Oscar Pistorius, finished fourth, whilst Brazil’s Alan Oliveira, who put in a sensational performance to beat Pistorius to 200m gold days earlier, came seventh.

Oliveira’s remarkable victory handed Pistorius, who won 400m gold in London, his first ever 200m defeat, a success that knocked football off the back pages of many newspapers back home in Brazil which bodes well for Rio 2016.

Other notable performances at London 2012 came from USA’s Raymond Martin, a winner of four T52 gold medals (100m, 200m, 400m, and 800m), his teammate Tatyana McFadden who scooped three golds and a bronze in the T54 racing class and Cuba’s T46 sprinter Yunidis Castillo who won all three sprint distances.

Australia’s Evan O’Hanlon set new world records in the 100m and 200m T38 meanwhile Russia’s Margarita Goncharova claimed three T38 golds and one silver.

In total 1,134 athletes took part in track and field events in London setting 102 world and 139 Paralympic records.

China sent the largest delegation of 48 athletes, whilst 59 countries were represented by just one athlete. Of the 141 countries that participated in track and field, 75 won at least one medal.

Next stop for the world’s best athletes will be the 2013 IPC Athletics World Championships in Lyon, France which get underway on 19 July.