​Dimitri Coutya became the first British athlete to win three gold medals at the European Para-fencing Championships [BBC]Team GB’s Dimitri Coutya said there is “a lot more he can do” after winning three gold medals at the Para-fencing European Championships.Coutya won a trio of titles in the epee, foil and sabre B categories at the event as well as two mixed team bronze medals in Cardiff last week, the first qualifying competition for the 2028 Paralympic Games. “I’m super delighted with these results but I know that there’s more that I can do,” Coutya told BBC Radio Somerset.”I had not the most ideal run up to these major championships, hadn’t trained quite the way I necessarily would have done due to injury, due to illness and I know looking at the week there are definitely things that I would have liked to have hit a little bit harder in terms of preparation and tactically being ready for the different opponents I faced.”But at the end of the day I can’t be ungrateful with with the results that I got.”GB’s Coutya wins birthday European Para-fencing goldCoutya claims gold hat-trick at Para-fencing EurosTwo-time Paralympic champion Coutya has been competing on the worldwide circuit for 14 years and has lived in Bath for the past six, training at the university where the Great Britain fencing team is based.The European golds took the 29-year-old’s tally of international medals during his career so far to 90, including eight at the Paralympics.At the Paris Games two years ago he came away with two individual gold medals, plus a team silver and bronze, to add to the silver and three bronzes he clinched in Tokyo in 2021.Coutya said he knows his success means he will be targeted by rivals as the person to beat going into the next Paralympics.”They’re very much looking at me now as the person to beat, and it’s nice to be in that position because of the amount of work that’s gone into the preparation and that’s put me where I am now,” he said. “But I do also think that with it comes a pressure, because they’ve got this drive and they’ve got this hunger for something that they’ve not necessarily managed to do before.However he added that going into Los Angeles 2028 trying to defend his golds, rather than win them for the first time, gives him a new challenge and motivation.”Paris will forever be one of the most surreal experiences of my life and now it’s trying to find my way through competition now knowing that I’ve had this experience and how do I now maintain and improve the standard that I had then,” Coutya added. “It’s a very difficult task to do but all of it is motivation.”