Britain’s first gold medal of the Paralympic Games went to a teenager, and in world record time, as Poppy Maskill cleared the field in the pool to win the S14 100m women’s butterfly, a moment she described as “unreal”.
The 19-year-old from Middlewich, competing in her first Paralympics, led from the front and held off the challenge of Hong Kong’s Yui Lam Chan to finish in 1min 03sec, shaving 0.33sec off the previous record. Unusually, that record had been set only four months ago by another British teenager, 17-year-old Olivia Newman-Baronius, who finished in fourth place on Thursday.
