(Paris) Boccia player Alison Levine made an exceptional throw with her final ball of the third end on Thursday in the BC4 doubles bronze medal match at the Paris Paralympic Games. Thailand’s Pornchok Larpyen immediately responded with a near-perfect throw that led the Canadian pair to an eventual fourth-place finish.
“A masterstroke,” described Iulian Ciobanu after the 6-1 defeat to the Thais at the Paris Sud 1 Arena. “The kind of throw we sometimes make that puts our opponents in difficulty. We were missing a ball in this inning and everything would have ended differently.”
“The shot I made before his, that’s a key shot you dream of making at a moment like that. I’m going to try to remember that shot especially when I think back on the match,” Alison Levine said of her approach shot late in the third set.
“I absolutely had to make the throw, there was a lot of pressure, I trained for these situations and I succeeded.”
Larpyen’s response was summed up in a long lob that pushed the jack back and brought it closer to Thai balls already in play. The throw gave his team three more points to make it 5-1.
The situation would have been much different if the Thai representative, who teams up with Nuanchan Phonsila, had scored his three points in the second end, as Ciobanu recalled. The Canadians would then have had two ends to overcome the four-point deficit they faced.
“Even by winning the last round, it was complicated to score four points,” admitted the Montrealer. “We still believed in it, but our opponents didn’t give up. We gave everything we had and we fought until the end, but the best won today.”
The Thai duo gave themselves a one-point lead early in the match, but the game tightened up in the second set. When measured, a Canadian ball was even placed on top of the jack, resting on two other balls. Each team eventually earned a point, making the score 2-1.
The sequence described earlier, which occurred in the following end, made all the difference. In the fourth inning, the official stopped the last ball thrown by Ciobanu because a wheel of his chair was on the edge of the throwing area. The Thais simply added a point afterwards and confirmed their victory.
“It was a big game, we only missed one ball in the first inning and one ball in the third inning. For their part, our opponents did everything they had to do. They played a perfect game and in that kind of weather, it’s very complicated. You also have to be perfect and we weren’t. They deserve their victory,” shared with disappointment the head coach César Nicolaï, very emotional in the mixed zone.
“It’s a tough fourth place after all the work we’ve put in over the last few years. We were hoping to top it all off with a medal. We’ll have to take a step back and see what happens next. We work very hard and when it doesn’t pay off at the Paralympic Games, it’s tough.”
The Thai players thus took their revenge on the Canadians, who had the last word during their last clash at the World Cup in Povoa, Portugal.
“We can only take our hats off to them,” Nicolai concluded.
Alison Levine and Iulian Ciobanu had started the tournament in doubles with victories against China and Croatia. Victorious in the quarter-finals against Ukraine, they lost to Hong Kong in the semi-finals.