A Paralympic swimmer was wrongly disqualified for breaking a little-known rule as chaos enveloped the event.
Australian athlete Ahmed Kelly had been competing in the men’s 150m medley SM3 heat on September 1, where he finished in second place, just behind fellow Australian swimmer Grant Patterson, per the Sun.
However, his celebration was cut short when officials announced that Kelly had been disqualified due to the stroke he used during the freestyle leg of the race.
Kelly, who was born without arms below the elbow and legs below the knee, performed a double-arm butterfly stroke instead of the more common front crawl.
This decision by Kelly led to his initial disqualification, as officials believed he had violated the rules.
Fortunately, Swimming Australia quickly appealed the decision, leading to the disqualification being overturned.
Annabelle Williams, a fellow Australian swimmer, clarified the situation during a broadcast on Channel Nine cited by the Daily Mail, pointing out that the officials had misinterpreted a rule in the medley.
"Now the good lawyer in me went to the rules and the definition of freestyle is that you can perform whatever you want, as long as it's not backstroke or breaststroke," Williams said.
"You can do whatever strokes you like; freestyle or double-arm butterfly. Ahmed had performed [a] double-arm butterfly, and so I can't understand why that rule seems to have been in breach."
She also addressed concerns about Kelly potentially swimming the strokes in the wrong order.
"And secondly, swimming strokes in the incorrect order. He definitely didn't do that," Williams said.
"There's video footage of him swimming the first lap on his back, the second lap doing breaststroke, and the third lap the double-arm butterfly, which is absolutely permissible when you're swimming freestyle."
There have been a few cases of disqualification in these Paralympic games, including one that heartbreakingly saw a Polish athlete stripped of her gold medal and world record.
Roza Kozakowska broke her own world record in the club throw with a distance of 31.30 meters on her first attempt, surpassing her previous record of 28.77 meters, set in June.
However, the triumph quickly turned into heartbreak after the Brazilian team filed a protest, alleging that Kozakowska used the wrong size pillow to support her head in her chair. The protest led to her disqualification.
Kozakowska’s disqualification awarded the gold to Tunisia’s Maroua Ibrahmi, whose last-attempt throw of 29.00 meters narrowly surpassed Kozakowska’s previous world record by 0.23 centimeters.
This victory marked Ibrahmi’s second gold in the event, following her win at the Rio 2016 Paralympics. Silver went to Iran’s Parastoo Habibi, while Brazil’s Giovanna Boscolo Castilho Goncalv, whose team filed the protest, took bronze.
The Polish Paralympic Committee immediately appealed the decision, but event organizers upheld the disqualification.
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