India’s Avani Lekhara won gold medal in R2 (women’s 10m air rifle SH1) with a world record score of 249.6 in the elimination round on Monday (30 August).
First Gold
for India at Tokyo Paralympics. 19 year old #AvaniLekhara has done it in Women’s 10m Air Rifle shooting. She becomes the first Indian woman to win a Gold at Olympics or Paralympics. Congratulations Avani. You have made India proud.
In 2012, suffering major injuries to her spinal cord due to a car accident, Lekhara was bound to a wheelchair. Three years later, Lekhara, encouraged by her father, took up shooting as a professional sport. “In 2015, he took me to both shooting and archery ranges, and I tried both, but I felt very connected towards shooting since the first time I held a rifle,” recalls Lekhara. After reading A Shot At History, Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra’s autobiography, Lekhara began to take the sport more seriously and now she has won gold at Tokyo Paralympics..
