Smale sweats on appeal

Britain's Danny Crates in the 400m semi-final on Saturday

Britain's Mark Smale is hoping Paralympic officials reinstate the F56 classification shot putt bronze medal he won in Sydney's Olympic Stadium on Friday.

Smale, 37, threw a season's best 10.70m to finish third to Poland's Krzysztof Smorszczewski ahead of Germany's Gerhard Wies.

But the German camp protested that Smale had been wrongly classified under the complicated classification system based on a competitor's level of disability.

Officials disqualified Smale and the bronze was presented to Wies.

However, the British management launched a counter protest which went to arbitration late Saturday afternoon.

Should Smale be reinstated into third it would boost Britain's total medal haul to 14 following further success in shooting, on the track and in the pool.

Amazing

Harlow's Isabel Newstead created an amazing record when she struck gold in the SH1 classification of the women's air pistol.

On the track another Harlow athlete, Noel Thatcher, was unable to follow up Bob Matthews' gold in the 10,000m T11 category.

Running in the T12 classification, Thatcher could only take bronze in his bid to defend the title he had won in Atlanta and Barcelona despite breaking his own world record.

Britain struck silver and bronze in the early swimming finals in front of a capacity crowd at the magnificent Sydney Aquatic Centre.

In the second event of the evening, Elaine Barrett of the Hackney Warriors club took silver in the SM11 classification of the women's 200m Individual Medley.

Barrett's time of 3mins 6.89secs was 4.07secs behind the winning time of China's Qiming Dong.

This was quickly followed by a bronze medal performance from Bath's Melanie Easter in the SM12 classification of the same event in a time of 2:44.10 with gold going to Hongyan Zhu also from China.

Emma Mounkley also struck bronze in the SM14 classification recording a time of 2:38.53 in preventing a home clean sweep with Australian's filling gold, silver and fourth place.