'I keep finding ways': Storey wins 19th gold in thriller

In a victory for middle-aged women everywhere, 46-year-old Dame Sarah Storey chased down and out-sprinted a teenager, the 19-year-old French star Heïdi Gaugain, to win the women's C4-5 cycling road race by half a wheel in a high-stakes last two kilometres into Clichy-sous-Bois.

- Tanya Aldred

It was Storey's second gold of the Paralympics, after taking the time trial on Wednesday, meaning that her outrageous medal haul - 19 golds in nine games (her first was Barcelona) - includes golds in four consecutive road races, in London, Rio, Tokyo and now Paris.

Storey doesn't make many - any concessions to age, but even she had to admit that her "glutes were on fire" after the race and her body was creaking, but "it's finding the ways to manage the process and privilege of getting older as an athlete".

Storey had been in the leading pack alongside Gaugain from early in the race as they zipped past the flats with the window boxes stuffed with geraniums, past the lines of excited schoolchildren hanging from the railings marking the route, past the waving French flags, the surprised dog walkers, the wayward long grasses of the early autumn verges and the earthy surrounds of the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sousBois seven laps of 14.2km through Seine-Saint-Denis. All the time, helicopters buzzed overhead and the sunglasses-wearing gendarmes on their motorbikes looked straight ahead.