Israel celebrates its best Paralympic showing in 20 years with 10-medal haul
Closing ceremony delegation to be led by flag bearers Ami Dadaon, who won four medals, and Gal Hamrani, captain of the women’s goalball team, which took a historic silver
Amy Spiro is a reporter and writer with The Times of Israel
Israel wrapped up its time at the 2024 Paris Paralympics on Sunday with 10 medals, including four gold, its best showing at the Games in 20 years.
Its 2024 medal haul just edged out its performance at the Tokyo Games three years ago, when the delegation brought home nine medals, and it marks Israel’s best showing since the 2004 Athens Paralympics, when it won 13 medals.
Israel also made history in Paris with its first Paralympic medals in both taekwondo and goalball — its first medal in a team sport in 36 years.
At Sunday evening’s closing ceremony, Israel’s delegation will be led by flag bearers Ami Dadaon, who won four swimming medals, and Gal Hamrani, the captain of the women’s goalball team.
“In our view, Ami and Gal — like the rest of the delegation — moved an entire nation and brought great honor to Paralympic sports and sports in general, and to the entire State of Israel,” Moshe Matalon, the chairman of the Israeli Paralympic Committee, said in a statement.
Like at the Olympics earlier this summer, Israel’s delegation, which came with a strong security detail, was faced with a number of threats as well as boycott efforts and anti-Israel provocations. Twice during the Paralympics, athletes refused to face Israeli competitors — Tunisia’s Achraf Tayahi refused to show up to a match against boccia player Nadav Levi, and Iran’s Saeid Sadeghianpour backed out rather than face Arab Israeli taekwondo athlete Adnan Milad.
The state will pay out more than NIS 8 million to the medal winners, after the Culture Ministry announced that its expanded grants will apply equally to Olympians and Paralympics — NIS 1 million for gold, NIS 700,000 for silver and NIS 500,000 for bronze. Athletes who won more than one medal win 50% of the amount for each subsequent medal.
Israel’s most decorated Paralympian is swimmer Dadaon, who returns home with four medals: two gold — in the 100m and 200m freestyle — silver in the 150m individual medley and bronze in the 50m freestyle in the S4 disability class. Dadaon, 23, was born with cerebral palsy and began swimming as a child for physiotherapy.
His emotional shouting of the Israeli national anthem during his two gold medal ceremonies made headlines during a particularly fraught week at home, and Dadaon used his post-race interviews to pay tribute to Israel’s fallen.
In an interview Friday after winning his fourth medal, the swimmer noted that the Paralympic delegation won 10 medals and the Olympic team came home with 7, “it’s symbolic, like October 7. Perhaps God is reminding us not to go back to October 6.”
Dadaon said it was “a pleasure to represent the State of Israel and the Jewish people — I love you, our soldiers, the families of the hostages, the families of the fallen, the whole Israeli people. I’ll never forget your support… I felt you every moment I was swimming in the water.”
The swimmer also won three medals at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, bringing his overall haul to seven.
Also in swimming, Mark Malyar won bronze in the men’s 100m backstroke in the S8 class.
Malyar, 24, who was also born with cerebral palsy, won three medals in Tokyo, and in the interim was told by Paralympic officials that he had to move to a disability class for those with milder limitations, but still managed to eke out a medal against new competitors.
Israel’s two other gold medals in Paris came from taekwondo athlete Asaf Yasur and rower Moran Samuel.
Yasur, 22, made his Paralympic debut this year and took gold after handily defeating every one of his opponents on his way to the top in the men’s under-58kg weight class. The kippa-wearing athlete lost both of his arms up to the elbow in an electrocution accident a few days before his 13th birthday, when he was trying to retrieve a wayward ball.
He came into the Games as a heavy favorite, after winning back-to-back world championships in 2021 and 2023.
Samuel, 42, marked her fourth games in Paris, after debuting in London 2012, winning a bronze in Rio 2016 and a silver at Tokyo 2020.
She took the gold in the women’s single sculls event in Paris. Now, with a medal of every shade around her neck, Samuel — who suffered a spinal stroke at age 24 that left her in a wheelchair — said she is officially hanging up her competitive oars and making way for the next generation of Israeli para-rowers.
That next generation includes Shahar Milfelder, 26, who made her Paralympic debut as part of a rowing duo alongside Saleh Shahin, 41, who together clinched a surprise bronze for Israel in the mixed double sculls race. Milfelder had part of her pelvis removed due to a cancer diagnosis when she was a teen, while Shahin was wounded in a 2005 terror attack while he was working as a security guard at a Gaza border crossing.
Israel also clinched a bronze medal in tennis when Guy Sasson beat Turkey’s Ahmet Kaplan in the men’s quad singles. Sasson, 44, was injured in a 2015 snowboarding accident that left him paralyzed from the knees down.
The delegation also won a silver medal in the women’s goalball tournament, its first team sport medal at the Paralympics since 1988, when the men’s volleyball team won silver.
The six-woman team, made up of those with vision impairments, competed in both Rio and Tokyo but never advanced past the quarterfinal round until Paris. This year, teammates Hamrani, Lihi Ben David, Elham Mahamid, Noa Malka, Or Mizrahi and Roni Ohayon beat Canada in the quarterfinal and took down China in the semifinal before losing to Turkey in the final match to take the silver.
With the Olympic season wrapped up for 2024, Israeli sporting officials have the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy on the horizon, with Israel yet to ever win a winter Olympic medal.
Meanwhile, Paralympic officials have been looking ahead to Los Angeles 2028, in particular as a motivational goal for the thousands of IDF soldiers wounded in Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza, many of whom are using sports and athletics to help adjust to their new lives.
