Winter Paralympics: Ukraine pull off double biathlon podium sweep

There were emotional scenes on day four of the Winter Paralympics in Beijing as Ukrainian athletes completed two podium sweeps at the National Biathlon Centre in Zhangjiakou.

Iryna Bui won the women’s standing 10km race nearly 13 seconds ahead of her compatriot Oleksandra Kononova in silver. Liudmyla Liashenko took bronze.

In the men’s middle distance vision impaired biathlon, Vitaliy Lukyanenko came out on top by nearly 45 seconds as Ukrainian para biathletes finished in the top five places in the race. Anatoliy Kovalevskyi and Dmytro Suiarko won the silver and bronze. In the para biathlon for visually impaired athletes, rather than shoot at targets with bullets, competitors use a laser-rifle, with an audio signal transmitted via headphones. The closer the aim is to the bull’s eye, the higher the frequency of sound heard by the athlete.

Ukraine’s Oksana Shyshkova nearly added her third gold of these Games in the middle-distance vision impaired category biathlon, but with two misses in the shooting she fell agonisingly short, finishing 3.7 seconds behind Germany’s 18-year-old Leonie Maria Walter, who added gold to her previous two bronze medals.

There was a US one-two in the women’s sitting middle-distance biathlon when Ukraine-born Oksana Masters picked up a 13th combined career medal at the Winter and Summer Paralympics with a silver behind team-mate Kendall Gretsch. Masters led for two-thirds of the 10km course, but despite picking up one shooting penalty, Gretsch finished 8.7 seconds ahead in the end. Liu Mengtao won China’s eighth gold medal of the Games in the men’s sitting event.

China lead the way in the medal table, with eight golds and 27 medals in total. Ukraine are second with six golds, and Canada third with