Ecuador’s Brian Pintado wins first athletics gold medal of Paris Olympics
Ecuador’s Brian Pintado won the men’s 20km at the Paris 2024 Olympics, earning the first athletics gold medal of the Games.
The 29-year-old clocked 1:18:55 to earn his country’s first Olympic gold medal in athletics since fellow race walker Jefferson Perez won gold in this discipline at the 1996 Olympics.
Brazil’s Caio Bonfim took silver in 1:19:09 and world champion Alvaro Martin earned bronze in 1:19:11. Defending champion Massimo Stano of Italy finished one second shy of a medal in fourth place.
Like many classic championship race walk events, it was a race of attrition with the lead pack being whittled down to the final few contenders in the closing stages. Held along the Pont de’Iena bridge in the Trocadero area of Paris, with the one-kilometre loop course leading athletes under the Eifel Tower, the race got off to a steady start with China’s Zhang Jun leading a large pack through 5km in 20:19.
The pace picked up slightly as Bonfim led the field through the halfway point in 40:21 with Pintado, Martin, Stano, Sweden’s Perseus Karlstrom, Spain’s Paul McGrath and Australia’s Declan Tingay all visible within the sizeable leading group of about 26 athletes.
Zhang and Pintado then started to push the pace, and by 14km the lead pack was down to 16 men. Karlstrom – winner at the World Race Walking Team Championships and the European Championships – was among those to have been dropped.
Pintado, Stano, McGrath, Martin, Bonfim and Japanese duo Koki Ikeda and Yuta Koga remained at the front, passing through 16km in 1:04:00 – exactly 1:20 finishing pace.
From that point onwards, the lap times sped up significantly. Bonfim dropped a 3:50 circuit to force a breakaway lead pack of five, alongside Pintado, Stano, Martin and Ikeda. After an even quicker lap, this time in 3:46, Ikeda had been dropped, but Canada’s Evan Dunfee had moved into fifth.
The lead exchanged several times between Bonfim and Pintado through the final two laps with Martin remaining in third, a few seconds ahead of Stano. As they embarked on their final circuit and headed back under the Eifel Tower for the final time, Pintado managed to finally make a clean break from Bonfim.
Pintado, the world silver medallist over 35km, went on to cross the line in 1:18:55 to take gold, 14 seconds ahead of Bonfim, who achieved his best ever finish at a global championships following his world bronze medals in 2023 and 2017. Martin, the double world champion, claimed bronze – redemption of sorts after finishing fourth in Tokyo three years ago.
“It was insane,” said Pintado. “In the last few metres, I realised I was completely alone, and seeing the finish line I just kept thinking, ‘I’m the Olympic champion, it’s me’.
“It has been tough to be away from my family, my wife, my kids, for four months and just seeing them through a screen,” he added. “But they were with me throughout the race. I have a picture of them with me. I also have a necklace of my son running beside me. I am wearing a scarf that my grandmother gave me. So really, they were with me all this time.”
Stano was just outside the medals on this occasion in 1:19:12, while Dunfee – bronze medallist over 50km in Tokyo – came through for fifth in 1:19:16. Perhaps one of the biggest surprises of the race was Ethiopia’s Wakuma Misgana placing sixth in a national record of 1:19:31, 10 seconds ahead of Tokyo silver medallist and world leader Koki Ikeda. (WA)
