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.”
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.
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