Paris 2024 Olympics day 11: athletics, cycling, boxing and more – live | Paris Olympic Games 2024

Boxing’s gender eligibility row shows no sign of ending with the IBA pouring fuel on the fire during a chaotic press conference.

Late in this report from Daniel Boffey and Sean Ingle, the president of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, offers some much needed administrative insight.

Asked about his position on the row, the World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, suggested that the controversy had spiralled due to a lack of clarity around the IOC’s rules.

“It’s unvarnished, have a policy,” he said. “Be clear and have a policy. You’re never going to make everybody happy but you have to plant the flagpole down somewhere and that’s why it was so important for us.

“I did five years on the British Boxing Board of Control as an administrative steward, and I have daughters. How do you think I feel about this? But in a way that’s incidental.

“The most important thing is to have a policy, be clear cut about it and have a policy that you are able to stand behind because it’s your north star. If you don’t, then you get into this sort of territory.”

After leading the gold medal tally in the pool for almost the entirety of the meet, Australia’s swimmers leave Paris pipped at the post by the USA. Attention has already turned to LA 2028.

The return to a four year cycle gives the team time to support the current golden generation and usher through a new group of talented young swimmers. “We have an extra year, we’ll just keep building, we’ll go back to the drawing board,” said Taylor.

There will certainly be change in the years ahead. Emma McKeon, Australia’s most successful ever Olympian, is retiring. And legendary Australian swim coach Michael Bohl, who coaches backstroke superstar Kaylee McKeown, is planning to take 12 months off before deciding whether to retire or return to the sport.

There have been whispers on the pool deck in Paris that Dean Boxall, who oversees the St Peters Western program including Ariarne Titmus and Mollie O’Callaghan, might also take an extended break. Boxall was the most successful coach in Paris, overseeing athletes who won nine gold, six silver and two bronze medals.

There is some serious talent in this picture. In the women’s 5,000m last night Beatrice Chebet did what so few athletes have failed to do in recent years and defeat both Faith Kipyegon and Sifan Hassan in the same race. Kipyegon still has the 1500m to go (her primary event) and Hassan has both the 10,000m and the marathon on her absurd schedule.

Almost every single French medal hope has delivered at these Olympics. And to the list featuring the likes of Marchand, Riner, Ferrand-Prevot, Dupont, and Beaugrand, may soon be added Henry, with the hosts into the final of the men’s football against Spain at the Parc des Princes.

This will be the first time gold in the men’s tournament has been won by a European team since Spain’s victory at Barcelona 1992, it also ends the dominance of Latin American nations after the last five editions of the tournament saw ­victories for Brazil and Argentina – two each – and Mexico.

It also gives France’s Olympic coach, Thierry Henry, the chance to add to his storied career, having won the World Cup and European Championship with France as a player. This would be his first major honour in a coaching career that is still early in its development.

France’s only men’s Olympic gold came at Los Angeles 1984 and the nation also took silver when the Games were held in Paris in 1900.

Wrestling is also the sport allowing Iryna Koliadenko to flourish, despite the trauma facing her homeland of Ukraine.

“It’s hard to prepare for competitions because I’m constantly under stress,” she says. “Psychologically it’s very difficult to withstand everything because there’s shelling, people are dying, sometimes there’s no light because the electricity goes off. There are air raid alarms all the time. It’s difficult to switch to the training mindset when you’re already psychologically exhausted and tired but you still need to go there, show some results and get better.”

One of the most extraordinary stories of the Games is playing out in the Greco-Roman wrestling arena where Cuban giant Mijaín López is on course for Olympic immortality.

Who is the greatest Olympian of them all? Ask an American, and they would likely say Michael Phelps. In Cuba, you might get a different answer.

Cuban Greco-Roman wrestler Mijaín López started his bid to become arguably the greatest Olympian of the modern era on Monday, as he moved one grapple closer to an unrivalled fifth consecutive gold in a single event.

After 1hr 25min 39sec of swimming, cycling, and running, the mixed triathlon podium was decided by a photo finish.

Over a few deafening minutes along the Seine, Team GB expected gold, were awarded silver, and were then downgraded to bronze after a wrongly adjudged photo-finish. We always knew a mixed triathlon embracing Paris’s greatest sights would look spectacular. But this was a race that also took the breath away.

Enough of the Games has passed for conclusions to be drawn and the first drafts of history to be written. In the pool, those pages will be dominated by Leon Marchand, but the narrative will remain contested until there is consensus over the participation of China’s delegation.

A swimmer has not owned an Olympics quite like this since Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in Beijing. Every session was sold out, every seat in the media section taken and every stroke stoked great roars of excitement from the French public, who gathered around TV screens in homes, bars, and restaurants around the country to watch. His finals were appointment viewing. He became the great home hero of the Games. And he’s not done. “This is just the beginning,” Marchand said this weekend. “My next goal is Los Angeles 2028.”

The sport needed it. The Olympics started under a cloud, when reports broke that 23 Chinese swimmers had failed drug tests for trace amounts of the banned performance-enhancing drug TMZ and a row broke out between the US Anti-Doping Agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency about the handling of the case.

Eleven of the 23 were picked to compete here in Paris. One, the breaststroker Qin Haiyang, was subsequently found to have failed another test for a different drug in similar circumstances. Qin said he was the victim of a “European and American plot”, and promised to win medals to “silence the sceptics”.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Biles in terms of hype and name recognition, Noemie Fox continued Australia’s excellent Olympics with gold in the first every gold medal in the hectic Kayak Cross. It is the Fox family’s third gold of the Games after sister Jess dominated the canoe slalom.

This discipline is a new Olympic event in 2024 that resembles Super Mario Kart on rapids.

Simone Biles has now left the arena, perhaps for the final time at an Olympics. She leaves behind some stunning images from her Paris residency.

Simone Biles was the star attraction early on day 10, but she could only add a silver to her existing haul of three golds in the finals of the balance beam and floor. She was the centre of attention nonetheless.

Although the American did not close out her Paris Olympics with a golden picturesque finish in a chaotic last day of artistic gymnastics, her final day of competition here was rather an exhibition of the sportsmanship and humanity that has accompanied her greatness. After a fall on the balance beam led to a fifth-place finish, Biles won a silver medal on the floor exercise.

With gold medals in the all-around, team and vault competitions, plus the silver medal on the floor exercise, the 27-year-old leaves Paris with four more Olympic medals. She is now the joint-second most decorated female gymnast at the Games with 11 medals in total and she has also extended her own record as the most decorated gymnast of all time, male or female, with 41 Olympic and world championship medals.

Also in the Stade de France Keely Hodgkinson continued her incredible rise. Still only 22 the British 800m star now has a gold medal to go with the silver she secured in Tokyo.

Hodgkinson took the lead 200m into the race, exactly as she had planned. This time, Moraa was right there behind her, but Hodgkinson didn’t let her get up shoulder-to-shoulder. Instead, she pressed on once, coming into the last bend, and then pressed on again coming out of it. She pulled clear down the straight and ran in alone, fresh air between her and the Ethiopian Tsige Duguma, who had overtaken Moraa as she slipped back into the pack trying, and failing, to break into a sprint that would catch Hodgkinson.

It took Hodgkinson thousands of hours to make it to that finish line, and thousands of miles, and a fair few defeats. And in the end she made winning look so very easy that you only wondered how she ever found it so hard to begin with.

But with the greatest of respect to surfing, the standout achievement of day 10 arrived in the Stade de France. It was the Olympic stadium where Armand Duplantis lived up to his billing, cruising to pole vault gold then delighting the full house with an Olympic then world record. He is the superstar athlete of his generation and his performances have pushed his sport lightyears into the future.

The roar is humongous, and focused on him alone. He sets off. In a few seconds he will be earthbound and away, into the crowd, the star of the greatest show on earth.

But let’s leave him right here, sailing through clean clear air, higher than any human before him, a man flying beyond the earthly plane and into immortality.

There has already been a medal for Australia to celebrate today, albeit one that comes under the official banner of day 10 action (that’s what happens when one of the venues is 12 time zones away from the Olympic stadium).

In the men’s surfing final France’s Kauli Vaast took gold ahead of West Australian Jack Robinson.

Local hero Vaast surfed a near perfect heat to claim gold at Teahupo’o, relegating tube-riding maestro Robinson to silver. The 22-year-old Vaast, who grew up in Teahupo’o and has caught some of the best waves of all-time at the perfect reef pass, quickly established dominance in the final and never gave it up, sparking celebrations on spectator boats in the channel and in a small fan zone.

While we’re looking ahead, here’s the view from a specifically Australian perspective.

We’re not in business until 09:00 local time today, whereupon volleyball is the first item on the agenda, namely China v Turkiye in the women’s quarter-finals.

At 09:30 canoe sprint and handball come onto our radar with 10:00 signalling an avalanche of activity, including equestrian, diving, sport climbing, table tennis, and the morning session of athletics.

Here are the choice cuts from yesterday’s action. My particular favourite is the sparkly sailing.

China and the USA have now pulled clear at the top of the medal table and will duke it out for supremacy for the remainder of the Games.

45 countries have now heard their national anthem at these Games, including the tiny Caribbean islands of St Lucia and Dominica after stunning track and field successes.

73 NOCs in total have made it onto the medal table.

Preamble – Day 11 Schedule