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Third silver medal for Field
Athens - They are calling Scott Field, the visually impaired swimmer from Cape Town, the Silver Swimmer after he won his third consecutive Athens Paralympic silver medal at the Aquatic Centre on Wednesday.
Silver flowed again for South Africa at the Equestrian Centre where Phillippa Johnson finished a narrow second on Burgmans Benedict to Norway's Cathrin Ann Lubbe on Zanko.
Johnson, who lives and trains in Belgium, claimed her first ever Paralympic medal after producing a solid performance on her horse. She was awarded 69.871%t for the execution of her programme, against the 70.839% that went to gold for Lubbe.
The SA team may have been ecstatic with their seventh silver that brought the tally to five gold, seven silver and one bronze medal, but Field was disappointed with his 55.36sec that trailed Russian Andrey Strokin's 55.27sec.
Field made it clear that he desperately wanted the gold, especially as he holds the world record of 54.92sec which he set in Mar del Plata in 2002.
"I'm very disappointed," he said. "It was a bad swim. This was my best hope for gold. I wanted to go a lot faster than that, by at least a second. I was hoping for gold, but a silver is a silver. Andrey beat me twice in Sydney, so it would have been great to beat him.
"I've got the world record in this event and it's a lot faster than we swam today."
Hilton Langenhoven, winner of the long jump silver medal for visually impaired with a superb 7.02m on Tuesday, finished fourth in the 100m B in 11.40sec final at Olympic Park.
Dominique Vogel (cerebral palsy) finished fourth in her 200m final in 32.86sec.
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