Flora Duffy, at the age of 33, has won Bermuda’s first gold medal in the Triathlon race at the Summer Olympic Games which makes Bermuda the smallest nation or Territory to win an Olympic gold medal. Duffy shows that small island states can dream big too.
According to the Olympic’s webpage, Bermuda’s first Olympics was in Berlin in 1936 and in its Olympic history, it has only taken home one other medal – boxer Clarence Hill won a bronze in the men’s 81kg heavyweight competition at the Montreal Games in 1976.
Duffy, making her fourth appearance at an Olympic, earned the gold medal in the women’s triathlon in Tokyo, Japan with a time of 1:55:36. This is more than a minute ahead of Great Britain’s Georgia Taylor-Brown and USA’s Katie Zaferes.
With its first gold medal, Bermuda with an estimated population of about 63,000, joins a short list of small countries to win gold at the Olympics but it’s still the smallest to do so at the Summer Games.
Only five small countries have won gold according to the Olympics:
1. Luxembourg, which has an estimated population of 637,177, won gold in the men’s 1500 in 1952.
2. Suriname with an an estimated population of 607,600, won gold in the men’s 100 butterfly in 1988.
3. Bahamas with an estimated population of 381,200, won gold for sailing in 1964.
4. Grenada with an estimated population of 113,084, won gold in the men’s 400 in 2012.
Other than Duffy, Bermuda has only one other athlete, rower Dara Alizadeh, at the Tokyo Games.
