Kiwi para-swimmer Josh Willmer has won silver in the men’s 100m breaststroke SB9 at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.<\/p>\n
Willmer won the event at Birmingham four years ago and qualified second fastest this time, behind Canadian Fernando Lu.<\/p>\n
In the final, where SB8 Willmer was racing against SB9 rivals, he trailled fourth through the 50 metres and rattled home to grab third at the finish in 1m 11.44s, a Games record for his class.<\/p>\n
Aussie Beau Matthews, racing as an SB9, took gold in 1m 09.41s, but after finishing second, Lu was disqualified on a technicality, promoting the Kiwi to silver.<\/p>\n
Willmer only learned his medal had been upgraded, when he was told by an official, as he was preparing to talk to media in the mixed zone.<\/p>\n
“It’s unreal, I had no idea,” he said. “I’m pretty stoked.<\/p>\n
“It’s a bummer to the guy who got DQ’ed, but silver – what an upgrade!<\/p>\n
“The race went perfectly to plan. It felt really good, it felt like I stuck to my race plan, and didn’t speed up my strokes heaps and kept to the basics.”<\/p>\n
Willmer was forced to move up a classification for the Commonwealth Games to SB9, with the SB8 class not in the Games programme.<\/p>\n
He said beating athletes in a higher classification was “mean”.<\/p>\n
“It’s too good. I love racing against people that are better than me.<\/p>\n
“I train in an able-bodied environment and I pretty much race against able-bodied breaststrokers.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kiwi para-swimmer Josh Willmer has won silver in the men’s 100m breaststroke SB9 at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-546949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}