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Day six, and as one hero departs, a legend gets her sixth Olympic gold
The Guardian
|August 02, 2024
Paris saw the best of Olympic sport as Andy Murray finally bowed out under the lights and US superstar gymnast Simone Biles made history - but a decision to allow a female boxer to fight a rival who failed a gender test left organisers under fire.
Murray, Great Britain's most successful tennis player of the open era, and a two-time Olympic champion, had hoped that his doughty double act with Dan Evans might delay his retirement by just a few more days, but the US team, Taylor Fritz, 26, and Tommy Paul, 27, proved too strong.
After the dramatics of the previous two rounds, when Murray, 37, and Evans, 34, had saved a plethora of match points to keep the show on the road - and the floodlights on the result this time rarely seemed in doubt, with the fist-pumping British pair no longer able to rage against the dying of the light in the quarter-final.
The match ended 6-2, 6-4, with Evans at the end pushing his visibly emotional friend back on to the court to take the roars of approval on what Murray has said will be his final professional outing.
For a sporting superstar performing at the top of their game, it was to the Arena Bercy that the savvy Olympic spectator went last night, where Biles, 27, won her sixth Olympic gold medal and second of the Paris Games, in the women's all-around final.
In doing so she became the third woman in history to earn the sport's most prestigious title more than once, but the stellar performance in Paris sealed her reputation as the greatest of all time.
It was a welcome and joyful conclusion to the sixth day of the Games that had seen the International Olympic Committee criticised by the UN's special rapporteur on violence against women and girls after the distraught Italian boxer Angela Carini to abandon her bout against Imane Khelif of Algeria after just 46 seconds on safety grounds.
This story is from the August 02, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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