Deepa Malik

Deepa Malik had a spinal tumour as a small child and spent years learning to walk again. She grew up, married an army officer and had two daughters. Then in 1999, when she was 29, the tumour came back. She had three operations and was left paralysed from the chest down, with a scar of well over a hundred stitches down her back. Her husband was serving in the Kargil war at the time.

For a while she was a wheelchair user expected to stay at home. She opened a restaurant in Ahmednagar instead, and then, in her late thirties, started competing. She swam across the Yamuna against the current, drove a modified car in rallies across the Himalayas and took up wheelchair athletics. There was almost no support for disabled women in Indian sport, and she often paid her own way.

She won her first international medals in the javelin and shot put in her forties. In Rio in 2016, aged 45, she threw a personal best in the F53 shot put to win silver, the first Paralympic medal ever won by an Indian woman.

She received India's highest sporting honour in 2019 and went on to serve as president of the Paralympic Committee of India, working to get the next generation the support she never had.