Israel’s women’s goalball team won silver at the Paris Paralympics on Thursday, the country’s first Paralympic medal in a team sport since 1988 and its eighth at these Games.
The team fell 8-3 to Turkey in the gold medal game. Lihi Ben David, who had served as one of Israel’s Paralympic flag bearers alongside Oct. 7 survivor and wheelchair tennis player Adam Berdichevsky, played with a broken finger she had sustained during the team’s 2-1 victory over China in the semifinals.
The squad had beaten Brazil in pool play before losing to both Turkey and China in that stage. Israel then beat Canada 5-1 in the quarterfinal on Tuesday before its victory over China to earn a spot in Thursday’s gold medal match.
Goalball is a handball-style sport for athletes with vision impairment in which teams of three attempt to throw a ball embedded with bells into their opponents’ goal.
Israel made its goalball debut at the 2016 Paralympics and had never made it to a medal match before Thursday. The silver medal is Israel’s first in a team sport since its men’s volleyball team won silver in 1988.
While political demonstration is prohibited on the field of play at the Paralympics, subtler references such as hair accessories have not run afoul of the rules. Several members of the goalball team wore yellow ribbons in their hair during the semifinal match, a sign of solidarity with Israeli hostages, according to the Times of Israel. And during the Olympics last month, Israeli silver medalist judoka Inbar Lanir also wore a yellow scrunchie, telling an Israeli news outlet, “Those who understand it, will understand.”
The goalball team features Ben David, 28, Elham Mahamid, 34, Noa Malka, 21, Gal Hamrani, 31, Or Mizrahi, 31, and Roni Ohayon, 25.
“I think it’s a huge honor,” Malka told Israel’s Sport5 broadcaster after the team’s semifinal win. “The situation in Israel is always on our minds throughout the tournament. I’m so proud of the team and of the girls, I’m proud to be a part of this thing… We knew the whole time what we were capable of, and today we proved it.”
Guy Sasson wins bronze
In June, Israeli wheelchair tennis player Guy Sasson reached the pinnacle of his career as he captured the quad singles title at the 2024 French Open in Paris, his first career Grand Slam win.
Three months later, at the same stadium, Sasson achieved another career milestone, winning his first-ever Paralympic medal, a bronze in the wheelchair tennis quad singles tournament.
Sasson, 44, beat Turkey’s Ahmet Kaplan 5-7, 6-4, 6-1 on Thursday in the bronze medal match to nab Israel’s ninth medal at the Paralympics. Sasson had won his first-round and quarterfinal matches before losing in the semifinal to Sam Schroder of the Netherlands.
After his French Open win, Sasson said his title “belongs to Israel,” which had just learned that four hostages had been rescued in a military operation from Gaza. His bronze came days after Israel was thrown into turmoil and mourning when the bodies of six hostages were recovered from Gaza.
“It was a match full of emotion and full of energy, and I imagine that it will set in soon that I’m an Olympic medalist,” Sasson told the Israeli news site Sport5 after his win. “If I managed to make people watching at home a little happy, especially the families of the fallen and the hostages, if this hope and this joy can give them a small smile on their faces, then I think we’ve done our part.”
Scenes of jubilation for Guy Sasson after securing the bronze medal! #Paris2024 | #Paralympics | #WheelchairTennis pic.twitter.com/zh3hNpQTO9
— ITF (@ITFTennis) September 5, 2024
According to the Times of Israel, Sasson said that before his matches, he had watched a video about the hostages and victims of the Oct. 7 attack, “and it gives me drive and a lot of motivation.”
And before his bronze medal victory on Thursday, Sasson said he had listened to a song written about Oct. 7 victim May Naim, the granddaughter of Israeli soccer legend Shlomo Scharf.
Sasson, from the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, was paralyzed from the knees down after a snowboarding accident in France in 2015. He started playing wheelchair tennis in 2018 and won the Israel Wheelchair Tennis Championship the following year.
In addition to his French Open victory earlier this summer, Sasson, who is ranked No. 3 in the world in his classification, had also made it to the finals in doubles at both the French and Australian Opens this year, as well as the semifinals in both singles and doubles at Wimbledon.
Jewish-American Ian Seidenfeld wins bronze
Three years ago in Tokyo, American Jewish table tennis star Ian Seidenfeld pulled off an upset, defeating the No. 1 ranked player in the world to win gold in his Paralympics debut. But on Thursday, he was unable to defend his title, settling for a bronze medal in Paris.
Seidenfeld, 23, won his round of 16 and quarterfinal matches this week in men’s table tennis singles MS6, both by a score of three games to none, before losing by the same score Thursday in the semifinal.
The Lakeville, Minn., native, who was born with Pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism, an inherited bone growth disorder, uses a paddle extension that helps him reach short serves. But in his semifinal match against Italy’s Matteo Parenzan, it was those short serves that foiled Seidenfeld’s chances.
“I’m a much better player than he is at almost every other shot,” Seidenfeld said after the match, according to Team USA. “So, I don’t need to improve my other shots as much as working on getting those short serves back. It doesn’t bring me joy to hit those shots or play against that. I really play table tennis to have fun.”
Seidenfeld’s Tokyo medal made him the first U.S. player to win gold in Paralympic table tennis since fellow Jewish player Tahl Leibovitz in 1996. Seidenfeld and Leibovitz played together in doubles last week but lost in the opening round. Leibovitz, 49, is competing in his seventh Paralympics.
Mitchell Seidenfeld, Ian’s father and himself a three-time Paralympian and four-time medalist, is a coach for the U.S. team. The younger Seidenfeld started playing table tennis at six years old and began competing internationally at 12. He won gold medals at the 2019 and 2023 Parapan American Games.