Paris 2024 Olympics day 13: Dutch delight in marathon swimming; heptathlon, taekwondo and more – live | Paris Olympic Games 2024

That’s the second Olympic gold in this event for Sharon van Rouwendaal after she won at Rio in 2016.

Play it loud for Sharon’s everywhere.

‘Everytime the sun comes up she’s winning medals’

Shout out to Team GB’s Laura Crisp who finished 20th.

Van Rouwendaal wins women’s 10km marathon sprint swim

Sharon van Rouwendaal takes the lead with a hundred metres to go! The Dutch swimmer has been biding her time and pounces at the last! They’ve been at it for over two hours!

Safe to say the words ‘Marathon Sprint’ fill me with a particular kind of dread. This Women’s 10km marathon sprint swim has been a gruelling watch, the tide is so strong that they are basically swimming on the spot and there’s just two seconds separating the leading three women, everything is going to hinge on the final turn!

The camera zooms in on one of the competitors ripping the top off a protein pouch without breaking stroke and downing the contents. The sun is beating down on the brown waters of the Seine and the crowd lining the banks are cheering them home…

Australia’s Moesha Johnson is still in the lead, The Netherlands’ Sharon van Rouwendaal and Italy’s Ginevra Taddeucci are right on her shoulder with a couple of hundred metres to go!

We have entered the final quarter of this women’s 10km marathon and the lead pack has broken away from the chasers. It’s still Moesha Johnson from Australian leading Sharon van Rouwendaal from the Netherlands and Italy’s Ginevra Taddeucci in third. Those three are taking that tough turn for the uphill leg of this penultimate lap.

But here’s some drama! Johnson has collided with a tyre and again the uphill turn has chewed into the leader’s margin. What a finish we have ahead of us in this most gruelling of Olympic swim events. And to bring you home and bring you up to speed on the women’s golf and taekwondo just getting underway…. here’s James Wallace!

Like van Rouwendaal – whom she currently leads by two body lengths – Moesha Johnson spearheads a new wave of Australian open water stars at the Paris Olympics.

Johnson won her way to Paris via the World Aquatics Championships in Doha, where the Gold Coast swimmer claimed fourth in a frantic finale. There Johnson surged into the lead in the final kilometre but was swamped by van Rouwendaal in the final metres. Can the 26-year-old Australian avenge that loss here in Paris?

As lap four draws to a close, Johnson is maintaining that two metre lead over her Dutch rival with Italy’s Ginevra Taddeucci hanging tough in third. Despite being a two-hour race, in Tokyo the distance between gold and silver in the 10km was 0.9 of a second!

As predicted the uphill leg has eaten into Sharon van Rouwendaal’s lead and now a combination of luck, guile and daring at the turn has swept Australia’s Moesha Johnson to the front. Italy’s Ginevra Taddeucci must have caught the same current because she has moved into third place and Australia’s Chelsea Gubecka is cruising in fourth. Japanese swimmer Airi Ebina has suffered most at that turn and has slipped back to eighth, 15 seconds from the lead pack.

Our leader in the 10km marathon swim is Sharon van Rouwendaal, a legend of open swimming. The Dutch woman started as a short-form swimmer, cracking the Netherlands Olympic team in 2012. However a shoulder surgery at those Games hampered her efforts to make the finals in the 100m and 200m backstroke.

By redefining herself as a distance swimmer, the 30-year-old from Baarn did much better. At the 2016 Rio Games van Rouwendaal missed the finals of the 400m and so decided to withdraw from the 800m to focus on the 10km event. The decision paid off as conquered the turbulent Fort Copacabana to win gold in 1:56:32.1.

In that 2016 race, van Rouwendaal made her move at the 6km mark to streak away from the field. We are getting to that stage here in Paris and van Rouwendaal has reprised the tactic. She has opened up a handy lead on Johnson. That lead will condense when they turn for the uphill leg but as the swimmers breach the hour mark and refuel with their chosen gels, it’s the Dutch swimmer setting the pace.

Catherine Ding has emailed me an intriguing line of inquiry:

Dear Angus, Nepo babies have got a lot of attention in the Guardian, usually accompanied by a sense of injustice and chastisement for a perceived lack of acknowledgement by the baby in question. However, that does not seem to apply to the Olympics. Leon Marchand, Jessica and Noemie Fox’s parentage are cited like evidence of their sporting pedigree. Is it just a matter of the relative hard work required in sport relative to the arts?

I’m not touching that one with a barge pole, Catherine. However, a barge pole would be handy in prising some of these marathon swimmers from being buffeted against the rough walls of the Seine. As the third lap gets underway the down-current leg finds Sharon van Rouwendaal still leading . However she now has two gold caps in her wake with Australians Moesha Johnson in second joined by compatriot Chelsea Gubecka who has surged to sit third. Japanese swimmer Airi Ebina has also made up ground to sit fourth.

There is now a 15-20m gap between this pack and the chasers but a long way to go.

Here in the 10km marathon we’re at the half-hour mark and only into lap two. It’s the Dutch swimmer Sharon van Rouwendaal who has snatched the lead. Ginevra Taddeucci is second and Ana Marcela Cunha from Brazil has snuck up into third. Early leader Moesha Johnson is now in fourth.

Along with all the bacteria in the water, there is also blood. By hugging the rutted concrete walls of the Seine to offset the swirling currents, the athletes are sometimes tangling themselves in the weeds attached to the walls and slicing their knuckles, forearms and feet open.

Some might consider that bloodshed “sacrifice”, others call it “chum”. I just hope none of them flicked on this film to decompress last night…

As the first lap of the women’s 10km marathon draws to a close, the pack has spread significantly in the 10km swim. That return leg ticked us over the 22 minuyte mark meaning it took 16 minutes compared to the SIX minutes of the “downhill” leg!

It’s Moesha Johnson in the gold cap leading with the Italian pair of Ginevra Taddeucci and Giulia Gabbrielleschi close behind and riding the Australian’s wake.

Australia are cheering on Chelsea Gubecka and Moesha Johnson in this gruelling 10km event but there are plenty of Aussies chasing glory on Day 13.

Of course the bigger issue for competitors hasn’t been getting a serving of E.Coli with their broccoli or bumping into a “Seine Cigar” – it has been the turbulence of the currents which have proved unexpectedly powerful. These swimmers are swimming with the current but as they hit the first turn, the return leg will find them stroking against it.

This is when tactics come into play. Although most of these competitors are heading for the reed-fringed river’s edge and the walls of the Seine to nullify as much of the current as possible, the swirling undertow is already having an impact on the pack. It took about 6.5 minutes for the first leg but the race pace has now slowed noticably and swimmers are digging deep to essentially swim uphill.

Time for some live Olympic action! The women’s 10km swim is about to splash down in the Seine. As has become the custom, Paris’s most controversial venue has endured a barrage of testing for water quality. But under sunny skies, organisers have confirmed that bacteria levels in the river are at a level that is considered safe for the athletes. And so the swimmers are on their marks and ready to paint the town brown…

The skateboarding events at these Games have features some of the youngest (and sweetest) athletes in competition. In this world of pimply prodigies, 51-year-old Andy Macdonald is a glorious anomaly. The “Rad Dad” and Team GB skater ruthlessly crushed a 12‑year‑old boy to qualify for these Games and provided endless entertainment iun competition despite missing the men’s park final yesterday.

As Barney Ronay says:

By the end, watching him work the crowd, beaming unstoppably, it was hard to avoid the sense he was representing another nation here. And that nation is the nation of 51-year-old men in cargo shorts.

When Gustave Eiffel began cobbling together the 2,500,000 rivets and 7,300 tonnes of iron required for Paris’s most famous landmark, he wanted it to embody

not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the 18th-century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France’s gratitude.”

Hosting beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower wasn’t on Gustave’s wishlist but the event has been a magnificent success. In tonight’s women’s semi-finals, the Brazilians will face Australian’s Mariafe Artacho del Solar and Taliqua Clancy – silver medalists at the Tokyo Games three years ago – while the Canadians take on Nina Brunner and Tanja Hüberli of Switzerland.

For the USA, the event hasn’t gone to plan…

For every rise there’s a fall and these Olympics have given us plenty of spills amid the chills. One of the scariest came last night when Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma, the world record holder in the 3000m steeplechase, suffered a terrible fall in the Olympic final.

Girma hit his head on the track after his knee clipped a barrier on the final lap. The crowd at the Olympic stadium held their breath as the Tokyo siulver-medallist then lay motionless before being put in a neck brace and taken off on a stretcher by medics.

Team GB’s Matt Hudson-Smith missed out on a 400m gold medal yesterday by just four-hundredths of a second. The bittersweet finish was magnified by the fact it would’ve been the first British gold in the men’s 400m since “the Flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell in 1924, a race made even more famous by its depiction in the 1981 classic Chariots of Fire.

While it was a golden Day 12 for Australia, Team GB enjoyed a day of silver linings.

That victory was all the more special for the incredible odyssey endured by the Australia team’s coach Tim Decker who has overcome more than most to steer the cyclists in his charge to great heights on and off the track. Tim told Kieran Pender:

For me, coaching has always been about more than writing a program on a bit of paper. Coaching is the connection and belief you instil in your athletes. Coaching is not shying away from challenges, making a result happen that an athlete thought wasn’t possible.

One of the great boilovers of these Games came at the velodrome yesterday when the Australian men’s team pursuit pipped Team GB for gold in one of Olympic cycling’s greatest events. As Kieran Pender so vividly described, both teams traded millisecond-long leads in a high-speed, high-pain duel to the finish that ultimately delivered Australia’s first track cycling gold since 2012.

It is a race of extreme endurance, across 4,000 painful metres. It is a race where man and machine combine – with the aerodynamic benefits of equipment as closely scrutinised as individual training plans. It is a race where seconds are measured to the third decimal, to the single millisecond. And it is the race where, at long last, Australia are Olympic champions.

One of the great things about Olympic Games is how they inspire fascinated spectators like you and I. Amidst all the gold medal-winning journalism and elite photography, the champions at The Crunch gift us amazing data visualisation about the Paris Games.

Much is made of the athletic feats of competitors at these Paris Olympics. Not so much about the mental agility and psychological resilience required to scale such heights.

Jess Thom, the lead psychologist for Team Great Britain, told the Guardian’s Madeleine Finlay how she prepares her athletes for failure and success – and the challenges that arise when the games are over and they have to return to normal life.

Simon Burnton reckons these are the other Day 13 highlights to look for…

• Climbing
  This is the last day with men and women in action. The women’s boulder and lead semi-final will be followed by the men’s speed final (the one event for each gender in Tokyo, combining all three disciplines, has since fissured into two). Since 2021 speed climbing has got a lot, well, speedier: the men’s world record has been broken 11 times since then, with Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo becoming the first person to go under five seconds last year and the USA’s Sam Watson bettering that mark twice on a single day in April.

• Track cycling
  Two of the great velodrome events conclude today, with the quarter-finals, semis and final of the women’s keirin – where riders follow a speed-controlled electric bike for a few laps before launching a wild sprint for the line – breaking up the four events of the men’s omnium, each of greater drama than the last, concluding with the brilliant, chaotic, bewildering and wonderful points race. The schedule is reversed, with men’s keirin and women’s omnium (plus the women’s sprint finals), on Sunday.

• Athletics: women’s 400m hurdles
  The anticipated showdown between Femke Bol of the Netherlands and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the USA, the two fastest women of all time over this distance, could be one of the highlights of this year’s athletics competition. The American spent 2023 focusing on the flat and returned to the hurdles in Atlanta in May with the fastest time of the year so far, a mark that Bol beat 12 days later. Bol has also impressed on the flat in the last couple of years, breaking the world indoor record twice, but this is where they are best.

The medal tally shows 72 nations have stepped onto the podium at the Paris Games.

So what can we look forward to on Day 13?

Here are the medal events in play today (all times AEST)

15:30
🥇 Open Water Swimming Women’s 10km
🥇 Open Water SwimmingWomen’s 10km

20:54
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Small Final

20:57
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Big Final

21:30
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s C2 500m Final A
🥇 Canoe SprintMen’s C2 500mFinal A

21:40
🥇 Canoe Sprint Women’s K4 500m Final A

21:50
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s K4 500m Final A

22:00
🥇 Hockey Men Bronze Medal Match: India v Spain

23:00
🥇 Diving Men’s 3m Springboard Final
🥇 Weightlifting Women’s 59kg

To be rescheduled – Sailing Mixed 470 Medal Race & Mixed Nacra 17 Medal Race

Preamble