Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jewish Australian race walker Jemima Montag wins second bronze medal in Paris

Montag captured bronze in the inaugural marathon mixed relay, days after placing third in the 20-kilometer race walk

(JTA) — 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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.