Greek race walker Antigoni Drisbioti won the bronze medal in the 35 km walk at the World Athletics Championships taking place in Budapest, Hungary on Thursday.
The Greek champion was among the leading athletes from the start and finished in third place with 2:43:22 behind Maria Perez of Spain, who won the gold with 2:38:40 and Kimberly Garcia Leon, who won the silver with 2:40:52.
In the last meters of the race, Drisbioti had the Greek flag with her and crossed the finish line with a smile on her face.
In May, Drisbioti won the gold medal in the 20 km walk at the European Championships held in Prague.
In February the 39-year-old athlete achieved a pan-Hellenic record which automatically qualified her for the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024.
More than two thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries are in Hungary for the World Athletics Championships, the third biggest sporting event in the world.
The nineteenth edition of the World Athletics Championships is being held from the 19th to 27th of August 2023 at the National Athletics Centre in Budapest.
The “golden” career of Antigoni Drisbioti
The Greek champion also attained gold medals in the 20 km walk and 35 km race walk at the 2022 European Athletics Championships, the first double gold for Greece at the event.
Her medal in the 35 km race was her first international victory and the first major championship title for her country in race walking.
Antigoni Drisbioti grew up in Karditsa, Thessaly. Her family runs a traditional restaurant in the city, where according to her own statements in a television interview, she has worked for many years alongside her athletic training.
She decided to practice walking as a sport as a freshman in high school and made her international debut at the age of nineteen at the 2003 European Race Walking Cup held in Cheboksary, Russia.
Drisbioti celebrated her first major success at age twenty-nine at the 2013 Mediterranean Games in Mersin, Turkey, where she won the bronze medal in the 20 km race walk with a time of 1:41:53.
She competed at the Summer Olympics for the first time in 2016 in Rio, finishing fifteenth in the 20 km walk. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she placed eighth in the event.
At the 2022 European Athletics Championships in Munich, she won the gold medal in the 35 km walk with a championship record of 2:47:00. This was after finishing fourth at the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon the previous month in 2:41:58, a national record.
With her second gold medal in Munich in the 20 km walk event and a personal best time of 1:29:03, she became the first Greek athlete to win two gold medals at the European Championships.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
