Asian Para Games 2023: Deepti Jeevanji wins gold, creates new Area and Games record

Ajay Kumar in 400m created a new personal best mark.

India's Deepti Jeevanji clinched an historic gold medal in women's T20 400m event by creating a new Area and Games record of 56.69 seconds at Asian Para Games 2023. Deepti has been in fine form in the past few month and recently won the gold medal at Virtual Global Games in France. Since taking up the sport in 2019, the athlete from Telangana has achieved several milestones.

In the same event her countrymate Pooja was disqualified alongside Singapore's Siti Nurhayati. Later in the day, Ajay Kumar bagged silver in men's T64 400m. He clocked a personal best time of 54.85 seconds and was few seconds behind Asana Nour of Saudi Arabia who created a new Games and Area Record by registering 52.81 seconds.

Meanwhile, Simran Kaur in women's T12 100m clinched silver by clocking 12.68 seconds. This was India's first medal in athletics today and there are still more events to go by in the event. A few years back Simran became the first Indian woman to qualify for Summer Paralympic in sprint - 100m at Tokyo, Japan.

The experienced sprinter is trained by her husband-cum-coach Naik Gajendra Singh of Indian Army. One of her major achievements was to clinch gold at Tunis World Para Athletics Grand Prix in T13 category held last year.

India has so far won 23 medals with the latest medal coming from Canoe. Gajendra in men's VL2 clinched bronze and this was sports' third medal for the day with Prachi and Manish contributing gold and silver respectively. Ekta Bhyan one of the most experienced athletes has assured herself of a medal in women's club throw and the event is still on progress.