Mariyappan Thangavelu says he hardly cries. But the day he left for the Rio Paralympics, he wept. That, he says, was because his mother embraced him and cried. “I cannot stand tears in her eyes. So I began to cry, I felt like I didn’t want to go away from her. She has been everything to me,” he says.
Speaking to The Sunday Express from Rio, Thangavelu, 20, says the best gift he could give his mother, Saroja — a fruit-seller in Periavadamgatti, 60-odd kilometres from Salem, in Tamil Nadu — was to win a medal at the Games. “For all the hardship she had endured to look after us, I needed to win a medal. So I told her I would come back with a medal and she should pray for me at the village temple every day,” he says.
And he did. At 2.52 am on Saturday, the high jumper leapt to the top of the podium with a jump of 1.89 m, to become only the third Indian to win a gold medal at the Paralympic Games.
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