No fairy tale for Fearnley but NSWIS hero bags 13th career Paralympic medal

Kurt Fearnley finally wound up his five-Games Paralympic career at Copacabana beach in Rio on Sunday (Monday AEST) but the NSWIS star fell agonisingly short of a fairy tale gold medal finish in the wheelchair Marathon, finishing a single second behind winner and doing time rival Marcel Hug.

No more than a five-metre gap separated Fearnley (1hr 26m17) and Swiss racer Hug (1hr 26m16) after the gruelling men’s T54 class marathon after the pair battled back and forth for more than 42km.

The NSWIS veteran, who along with his wheelchair racing feats has crawled the 96km Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea and sailed in the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, was neck and neck with Hug until the final 20m when the Swiss broke Fearnley to storm home to victory.

“With 200m to go, everything I had kind of stopped,” Fearnley said.

With his wife Sheridan bringing their two-year-old son Harry to watch for the first time, Fearnley put it all on the line in typical fashion.

“It’s a day that he (Harry) may never remember but it’s a day I won’t forget,” he said.

It wasn’t the way the proud Novocastrian had hoped to bow out of the Paralympics, but Fearnley leaves content with how far he’s come and how the movement’s progressed.

“I think I ran about 32nd in my (first) Paralympic marathon back in Sydney. And I’m grateful for that start,” he told AAP.

“That start is the thing that has given me the next 16 years to build on. I’m as proud of that day as I’m today.”

It was the 35-year-old’s fourth straight medal at a Paralympic marathon and his second medal in Rio after he won bronze in the 5000m earlier in the Games.

While he says Rio is his last Paralympic campaign, Fearnley aims to have an Australian team swansong at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast and hopes to extend his reign on the major international marathon circuit.

“Hopefully I’ll be racing for another 60,” Fearnley told AAP.

“I’ll race marathons for as long as my body can.”

In the corresponding T54 women’s wheelchair Marathon, fellow NSWIS and Paralympic veteran Christie Dawes finished ninth, a little over four minutes behind Chinese winner Lihong Zou.