New Delhi: Swapna Barman’s story of grit and determination will become a part of the annals of sports history. Winning the Gold in heptathlon at the 18th Asian Games in Jakarta despite all odds, she is a living example of a true sportsman’s spirit, which cannot be explained in any dictionary.
It won’t be long before she has a couple of firsts attached to her name i.e. the first Indian and the first Indian woman to win a Gold in heptathlon in the Asian Games and the biggest of all, the first athlete in the world with 12 toes to win in an international sports event.
Swapna, who has a dozen toes, said every step of the race was painful as she pushed through the events in her ill-fitting footwear.
“Normal shoes don’t work for me. There is a lot of pain when I wear any shoes, spikes or anything,” she said after clinching the Gold on Wednesday.
“I hope they make special shoes for me because I have a lot of pain,” she added.
She won the high jump evSent as well as shot put and javelin, to record a personal best score of 6,026, despite her woes on the track.
Her weakest events were 100m (981 points, 5th position) and 200m in which she finished seventh with 790 points.
Going into the 800m run, the last of the seven-event competition, Swapna was leading China’s Qingling Wang by 64 points. She needed a good run in the concluding event, in which she eventually finished fourth.
Swapna first tasted success last year when she won a Gold at the Asian Championships in India.
She then suffered a string of ankle and back injuries that kept her out for most of the year. But she was back in action in time to finish second in India’s Asian Games qualifiers.
Twenty one year old Swapna belongs to an impoverished family of the East Indian town of Jalpaiguri. “I have never considered surgery to remove the extra toes, blaming the extra width of her feet for the pain.”
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