Karolina Pęk won the gold medal in singles at the Paralympic Games in Paris. In the WS9 class final, she defeated the experienced Chinese Xiong Guiyan 3:2 after a match in which it seemed at one point that she would find no solution.
The course of the final with the participation of the 26-year-old Pole and the 48-year-old Chinese woman resembled a sine wave. In the first set, Pęk dominated, leading even 8:2. It ended with the result 11:7 after an effective, long, beautiful exchange, which this match was full of. So the course of the second and third sets was a surprise, in which Xiong achieved almost everything, while Pęk – not much. The defeats of our representative 2:11 and 4:11 did not inspire optimism.
Each set is a separate story. In the fourth, it was already 4:1 for Pęk, but the Chinese woman equalized and took the lead 8:6. Then, the Pole won three points in a row and soon there was an advantage game. Karolina Pęk withstood the test of nerves better, winning the fourth set 13:11.
It was 2:2 and the Paralympic championship was to be decided by the fifth set, which turned out to be quite a thriller. From the beginning, the Pole was not doing well. At one point, the Chinese player was winning 7:3. Suddenly, however, Pęk started playing as if in a trance, and her opponent was getting lost. Our player scored the next six points. Xiong Guiyan found no answer to this charge and the last set ended with the score 11:8 for the Pole.
– I really don’t know how I did it – said Karolina Pęk right after the final. – I didn’t look at the result, I tried to play ball by ball and listen to the coach, who talked a lot. He tried to remind me how I should play, where on the table, he talked about tactics all the time, and above all he kept telling me to believe in myself.
He waited 9 years
The coach is Xu Kai, a Chinese who has been associated with Poland since the 1990s, a former great competitor, currently a coach, who has been working for many years with the Polish Paralympic team, including for almost a decade with Karolina Pęk.
– The first thing the coach said after the match was that he had been waiting for this for 9 years and that he had already done his job – said the player. – When I was 16, I came to the coach in Krakow and that was our common goal, for me to win the Olympics. He always said that the European or World Championships didn’t matter to him, only the Olympics. I’m glad that I could finally do it for him, because I know that my character is not easy, we argue a lot during training, we’re fed up with each other, but in the end I did it for him and most of all for myself.
This is Karolina Pęk’s eighth Paralympic medal, but she has never made it past the semi-finals in singles (she recently lost to Xiong Guiyan in Tokyo). Her two gold medals so far are those won in the team, including with Natalia Partyka. Pęk has never hidden how important the 12-time Paralympic medalist is to her. In Paris, they won bronze in doubles together.
They were even texting each other before the final. Pęk asked about how to play it. Partyka advised her to stabilize her game, and the second piece of advice… was a quote from the famous, blunt motivational speech by volleyball player Tomasz Fornal from the match against the USA during the Olympic Games.
– Since I started playing, since I met Natalia, my goal was to win gold – emphasized Karolina Pęk. – There were moments after defeats when I thought: how much longer do I have to wait? Today I finally did it, but I don’t want to stop at one gold.
Tomasz Przybyszewski, Tomasz Gorazdowski, press release of the Polish Paralympic Committee, photo: Bartłomiej Zborowski/Polish Paralympic Committee
