Looking towards athletics in Rio: T54 women’s world records

This article is part of a ParaSport News series of articles looking at athletics world records and world records progression.

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The T54/F54 class continues the T50s/F50s classes for people with spinal cord or spinal cord like disabilities who use a wheelchair in competition.  The class is for paraplegics with normal hand and arm function, limited to no trunk function, and no lower limb function.  It is often combined with the T53/F53 class for world records. Related disability type classes that are often included in this class include A2 and A3 for amputees, CP3 and CP4 for people with cerebral palsy, LAF3 for Les Autres competitors and F4 for spinal cord injuries. Two of the most famous women in this class include Canada’s Chantal Petitclerc and the United States’ Tatyana McFadden.

This class has a bit more competition with world record progression visible in the women’s T53/T54 4×400 meter event, and the women’s 5,000 meters.  In the first, China set a world record at the 2011 IPC Athletics World Championships in New Zealand with a time of 03:46.1.  Last year at a meet in Beijing, they bettered this by about 6 seconds with a time of 3:40.66.  In the T53/T54 5,000 meters, Chelsea McClammer of the United States had a time of 11:04.54 in Arbon, Switzerland.  Two days later, fellow America Tatyana McFadden equalled this time.  McFadden has another current world record, the T53/T54 1,500 meters.  She set this in Arbon last year when she posted a time of 3:13.27.

Tunisia’s Hania Aidi is another multiple world record holder in this class, but more in the sense that she has broken her own.  At the 2011 IPC Athletics World Championships, she posted a distance of 17.27 meters in the javelin and then improved upon this by over a meter four years later at the same competition in Doha, Qatar with a throw of 18.86 meters.

The most recent world record in the class was set by China’s Liwan Yang at a meet in April this year in Beijing when she threw the shot put 7.9 meters.  The oldest world record in the class dates to 1994 in the P54-58 women’s pentathlon, when Germany’s Marianne Buggenhagen scored 5707 points.