Barry so happy to stay cool on night to remember in London

It was a toasty 21 degrees when Orla Barry emerged into a rapidly filling Olympic Stadium on Tuesday evening for the T57/58 final. By the time she left, the great stadium was almost empty again and the thermometer had recorded a precipitous fall.

More than four hours had passed in the meantime and she had spent the last portion of it wrapped up tightly in five layers of green, her mind assaulted by a range of conflicting emotions as she watched one after another competitor enter the cage.

Barry had been the first of 18 competitors to throw in the first round and the third last to return to the cage for the final, all of which meant a three-hour spectating brief in between that must have amounted to a sporting version of Chinese water torture.