Originally posted by: lashy
<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">Remember girls how I said, India is good at Paralympics and yet we never even hear about it (when I feel this is something that must be encouraged more)</font>
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<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">We just won a Gold medal and a Bronze medal in the Rio 2016 ongoing Olympics (Paralympics) for a record-breaking high-jump attempt.</font>
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<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">👏</font>
<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">This isIndia's first medalat the 2016 Paralympic Games, and withVarunBhati's bronze, India now has two medals in this edition.MariyappanThangavelu also became the first Indian high jumper to win a Paralympics gold. </font>
<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">Mariyappan is a 20-year-old hailing from a small village of Periavadagampatti, 50km from Salem, in Tamil Nadu. He met with abus accident at the age of five, which left him with a permanent disability. He was going to school when the bus took a wrong turn and ran over Thangavelu's right leg, damaging it below knee.But that tragedy couldn't stop Thangavelu frompursuing his dreams. In his first competition, he competed with able-bodied athletes and finished second. His rise has been steady since then.In March, Thangavelu cleared a height of 1.78m at the IPC Grand Prix in Tunisia, to achieve the A-Qualification Standard of 1.60 at Paralympics.</font>
<font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="3">Twenty-one-year-old Bronze medal winner Varun Bhati, who's from UP, was diagnosed with polio at a very young age as one of his legs got deformed. Despite the difficulty, Bhati went on to become a champion athlete.</font>
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