A Lower Mainland race walker has won an Olympic medal in the blazing heat in Tokyo.

Evan Dunfee of Richmond captured bronze by passing a Spanish competitor at the end of his 50-kilometre race.

Poland's Dawid Tomala won gold and Germany's Jonathan Hilbert took the silver medal.

Dunfee, 30, is a graduate of Matthew McNair secondary in Richmond and the University of British Columbia.

In the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Dunfee came fourth but appeared to win a bronze medal after third-place Japanese race walker Hirooki Arai was disqualified for bumping into him.

However, Dunfee lost his third-place finish after Arai won an appeal.

Dunfee chose not to file his own appeal because he knew that Arai did not bump into him on purpose and that the Japanese race walker's actions weren't malicious. Therefore, Dunfee didn't think he should lose his medal.

"Nothing about my race changed, I achieved all my goals and I left every ounce of energy I had on the race course that day, I didn't need a medal to remind me of that," Dunfee wrote on his website.

Dunfee spends a great deal of time walking around Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. Earlier this year, he said in a TV interview might like to run for municipal political office at some point because he knows Richmond so well after seeing so much of the city.

https://twitter.com/EvanDunfee/status/1423237698744201216

Dunfee confessed on his website that even though he loved being active as a kid, he never felt that he was destined to be an elite athlete.

"Growing up I was the shortest kid in the class, born 5 weeks pre-mature with pretty awful motor skills," he wrote. "I loved sport, I just wasn't very good at anything. Most of my early sporting memories are sitting in the outfield in Baseball or in goal in Soccer and picking the grass."

But he discovered race walking when his older brother took up the sport. "So I gave it a try, won my first race and was hooked."