Kare Adenegan


Kare Adenegan is a British wheelchair athlete specialising in sprint distances in the T34 classification. She was classified as a disability athlete in 2013.
Competing for Great Britain at the 2016 Summer Paralympics, at the age of 15, she won a silver medal and two bronze medals. In 2018, Adenegan set a new world record in the T34 100m at the Müller Anniversary Games in London, with a time of 16.80 seconds. Adenegan is the only T34 athletes to have completed the 100 metres in sub 17 seconds
Adenegan is also the only athlete to have defeated Hannah Cockroft in aT34 Women’s wheelchair race..
She won the 2018 BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year award.

Early years

Adenegan was born in 2000 in Coventry, England and attends Bablake School. She has cerebral palsy.

Athletics career

Adenegan took up wheelchair racing in 2012, after being inspired by the Summer Paralympics in London. At school she found herself excluded from sports due to her cerebral palsy, but the Games made her realize that sport was open to her. That year she joined a wheelchair academy in Coventry, and after becoming classified as a T34 athlete she began competing at national meets in 2013.
In September 2015 Adenegan managed a major sporting coup when at the Grand Prix final in London she became the first athlete to beat world record holder Hannah Cockroft in more than seven years. The two team-mates met again a month later when Adenegan as selected as the youngest member of the Great Britain team at the 2015 IPC Athletics World Championships in Doha. There she entered three events, the 100 metres, 400 metres and 800 metres, all in the T34 classification. Although just missing out on the 100m podium, after finishing fourth, Adenegan won her first major international medals of her career with bronze positions in both the 400m and 800m events. Both events were won by Cockroft.
Although she qualified for the 2016 IPC Athletics European Championships in Grosseto, Adenegan pulled out of the event to concentrate on her preparations for the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. When the final Great Britain athletics squad was announced, Adenegan was elected for three events and was the youngest team member in the track and field squad.
In 2018 aged 17, Adenegan broke the T34, women's 100 metres world record at the London Muller Anniversary Diamond League defeating Hannah Cockroft by half a second. Adenegan’s placed a time of 16:80 seconds making her the only T34 athlete to have gone under 17 seconds in the history of the sport.
In August 2018, at the Para World European Athletics Championships in Berlin, Adenegan defeated Cockroft in the T34 100 metres for the second time in the season, also setting a championship record of 17:34 seconds. Adenegan got her first gold medal in senior competition and a silver in the 800 metres in the same competition.