Jewish Australian race walker Jemima Montag captured her second bronze medal of the Paris Olympics on Wednesday in the sport’s inaugural marathon mixed relay event.
Montag and her teammate Rhydian Cowley finished the race in 2:51:38, one minute and seven seconds behind the gold medal-winning team from Spain. Ecuador took the silver medal.
The win makes Montag, 26, Australia’s first woman in 52 years to win two medals in track and field’s athletics category at the same Olympics.
Montag had won bronze last week in the 20-kilometer race walk, an event in which she set her country’s record in February in a competition in the Australian city of Adelaide. She told the Australian news outlet Nine that her motivation had waned after her first medal.
“I’ll be really honest, it was hard to come back up after that first medal,” Montag said. “I felt like I was self-satisfied already and I was thinking, ‘Where am I going to go to find the motivation to get myself to go again six days later?’”
But Montag said she pulled it together for her teammate.
“I had to tap into one of my values of teamwork and gratitude,” she continued, referring to Cowley. “We’ve been training together for as long as I can remember… This might be his last Olympics and I wanted to send him home with a medal. To be able to do that is rewarding.”
Montag, who is also a full-time medical student at Melbourne University, is a two-time gold medalist at the Commonwealth Games and a silver medalist at the 2023 World Athletics Championships. She was named Australia’s Outstanding Jewish Junior Sportswoman of the Year in 2013 at age 15.
Montag is one of at least three Jewish Aussies to medal in Paris, alongside canoeist sisters Jessica and Noemie Fox.
