Tokyo Paralympics silver winner Thangavelu Mariyappan won a gold in T63 high jump with a World Para Athletics Championships’ record of 1.88m. This was his first gold in a major event in eight years.
The 28-year-old Mariyappan won gold in T42 high jump in the 2016 Rio Paralympics and a silver in the Tokyo edition in 2021 in T63. He also won a silver in the T63 class in the Hangzhou Para Asian Games last year.
The T63 classification is for athletes with single through knee or above knee limb deficiency competing with a prosthesis.
Americans Ezra Frech and Sam Grewe won silver and bronze with jumps of 1.85m and 1.82m respectively.
Hailing from Salem district in Tamil Nadu, Mariyappan was raised by his daily wage labourer mother who also sells vegetables after his father abandoned the family.
At the age of five, Mariyappan suffered permanent disability in his right leg when he was run over by a drunk bus driver while walking to school. Before taking up sport, he would do the job of newspaper hawker and work at construction sites to help his mother run the family.
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Earlier in the day, Ekta Bhyan secured the gold medal with a season’s best throw of 20.12m in the women’ F51 club throw competition. Another Indian Kashish Lakra took the silver with an effort of 14.56m in the same event.
Ekta, a Haryana Civil Services (HCS) officer, had won a bronze medal in the Hangzhou Para Asian Games.
The 38-year-old Ekta, who took up sports after her selection in the Haryana government as HCS officer, also won gold medal in the club throw event at the 2018 Para Asian Games in Jakarta.
Ekta wanted to pursue a career in medicine but an accident in 2003 cut short her dream. The accident happened near Kundli in Sonepat district when a truck overturned on her cab on the Delhi-Haryana border.
While she suffered quadriplegic spinal cord injury and remains wheelchair-bound, six other students were killed in the accident.
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