Paralympics: David Smith says 'Boccia gods weren't on his side' after missing out on individual medal

David Smith congratulates Muhamad Syafa after the bronze medal match, Credit: imagecomms

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Boccia athlete David Smith missed out on a medal in his individual BC1 event at Paris 2024 on Sunday and afterwards admitted that 'if he didn't laugh, he would cry'.

Smith - a member of SportsAble and a regular user of its facilities in Braywick Park before they were closed a few years ago - is one of the greats of his sport and had been hoping to add to his three Paralympic gold medals.

He does still have one more event to compete in before he heads home, joining Claire Taggart in the mixed team BC1/BC2 event which starts today (Tuesday) and runs through till Thursday.

Boccia is one of three Paralympic-specific sports which has no Olympic counterpart and is for athletes with conditions such as severe cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy that affects all four limbs.

Similar in style to indoor bowls, both players have six balls - one side has red balls, the other blue balls - and the aim of the game is to get your balls closer to the white target ball, the jack, than your opponent.

Smith has been a dominant force on the Boccia scene for more than a decade after winning his first medal at London 2012.

He had been expected to match the achievement of Britain's Stephan McGuire - who defeated Colombia's Edilson Chica 8-5 in the BC4 men's individual event at the South Paris Arena.

However, 'the Boccia Gods weren't with him' as he went down to a shock semi-final defeat to South Korea's Jung Sungioon, while a 5-3 defeat to Paralympic debutant Muhamad Syafa of Indonesia on Sunday meant that he didn't make it onto the podium in the individual event for the first time since Beijing in 2008.

Smith - who once again competed with his hair dyed blue and red - played his best Boccia in the earlier rounds of the competition before coming unstuck in the latter stages.

“I knew I would lose at some point, but just unfortunate the way that it turned out that it was a semifinal that I should’ve won,” he said afterwards.

“On another day, I would have won that (semifinal) win comfortably.

“It’s just that the Boccia gods were playing with me, massively, and it just didn’t work.

“It’s so different. Maybe when I won gold in Rio, where there were maybe one or two (medal contenders), and then obviously in Tokyo, there were a few more. But it was still maybe me and a couple of others.”

“But this time around, I came in not dominant. I came in knowing that I had to hold on to the world number one for a long, long time, and I’ve been clinging onto it with my fingernails, knowing that there are people either side of me waiting to take it.

“I knew it myself that I can’t do much more than that. That’s it—when you’re playing at the top level, and you know that you’ve got three games to go and you’ve already hit your top standard, when you had to hit your top standard to beat someone to get out of the pool on the right side,” he said. “I gave myself the best possible chance, but I ran out of gas.”

Smith let slip a three-point lead in his semi-final against Sungioon allowing the South Korean to fight back for a 4-3 victory. He was also unable to hold onto a lead in his bronze medal match with Syafa.

“The floor (of the arena) didn’t help, so I’ve been struggling and trying to find my way through it. It just doesn’t suit my game,” Smith said.

“I’ve medalled in every single tournament I've have in the last three years, which is I think some achievement, considering the standard that you can now see. Just unfortunately, not this time around.”

On his hopes of winning a medal with Claire Taggart in the mixed event, Smith added: “I think we’ve got a good team, and I think we’ve got a good chance as well as all the other teams,” he said.

“But who knows? I don’t know. I’m not going to predict the team anymore because my predictions have been rubbish.”

Another SportsAble member, Hungary's Tamas Gaspar also failed to win a medal in the para-archery event in Paris.

In the last 16, Gaspar comfortably defeated Frenchman Damien Letulle 136-119. However, he was narrowly defeated 137-134 by China's Han Guifei in the quarter finals.

Guifei went on to reach the final where was defeated 134-131 by USA's Jason Tabansky.