Brilliant Cockroft in another orbit with dominant Paralympic gold

By James Toney in Paris

It's Hannah Cockroft again, with a telescope needed to see the rest.

They don't nickname Britain's greatest ever wheelchair racer ‘Hurricane’ without good reason - she doesn't just beat her rivals but ruthlessly blows them into a different arrondissement and all with a smile on her face too.

It's hard to think of a track and field event - Olympic or Paralympic - as dominated by one individual as the T38 100m, Cockroft now a four-time champion.

Of the 549 medals awarded at these Paralympic Games, this likeable athlete from Halifax is the one number banker, the surest of things that means the real question is not if she'll win but by how much.

She duly flashed across the line a good five metres ahead of her nearest rival, team-mate Kare Adenegan, the result secure after a flying start left rivals once again in her slipstream.

Since her breakthrough at London 2012 she's lost just one major final and although her 16.30 secs winning time was nearly half a second slower than her world record, it was still nearly a second quicker than the silver medallist.

Her four wins in this event boast a remarkable combined margin of a three and half seconds, dominance not even doing justice to just how good she is.

She magnanimously insists the rest of the world are catching up, though on this evidence they've plenty of work to do.

“I’m making my life well hard doing this," said Cockroft.

"You know you are the person people are watching but that’s what keeps you going, you don’t want to let them down and I know I have more in me too.

"My time wasn’t amazing but it doesn’t matter. This was the scary one. In my head, I always overestimate Kare and that’s not a bad thing. It means so much to hold on for a fourth Paralympics, not a lot of people do that.

"I’m 32 now, which everyone keeps telling me is old. I’d love to get another Games in and I can definitely get quicker. I’m going to break 16 seconds before I’m done.

“The standard is increasing massively, there are so many new girls on the line and they are all coming for me."

Cockroft doesn't know what it's like to lose, this was her seventh gold medal from four Games and she'll start favourite for the 800m later this week too.

"What can you do?" admitted Adenegan. "She's great an amazing athlete but you just have to keep working harder to close the gap. You could get frustrated but she’s an inspiration.”

Sammi Kinghorn, a wheelchair racer in the T53 classification, has long spoken of her admiration for Cockroft, watching her in the stands at London 2012 and now her training partner.

The wheelchair racer grew up on a farm near Gordon, in the Scottish Borders, was taught to deliver lambs at the age of five and loved animals so much she wanted to be a zoologist.

In 2010, Kinghorn – then just 14 - and her father were clearing snow at the farm when she climbed onto a forklift and he lowered the beam onto his daughter, shattering her spinal cord.

From farm life to the fast lane, Kinghorn upgraded her 100m bronze in Tokyo to 800m silver in Paris.

"Hannah tells me all the time about the roar of the crowd at London 2012 and now I've experienced it too, that was special," said Kinghorn.

“I’ve worked incredibly hard, if I had come fourth, just the fact that my mum and dad and friends and family were in that stadium was enough for me. As soon as I crossed the line, I went over to them and I was just crying my eyes out.

"It wasn’t even the fact that I won a medal, it was the fact that they were there to see me do something that I love."

Elsewhere, Great Britain's Sabrina Fortune claimed gold with a world record 15.12 metre throw in the women's F20 shot, a mark she has lowering and lowering all season.

"To throw a world record with my first effort, I just had to keep a control on my emotions," said Fortune.

"I knew I had a big throw in me. It was a magical evening; the roar was deafening. I was so scared to go out there and I can't believe I've had that experience.

"I've had world record after world record this year but I still needed to deliver in the final."

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