When Deepthi Jeevanji won India’s first gold medal at the World Athletics Para Championship in Kobe, Japan, her parents recalled how her unusual features at birth had prompted relatives and acquaintances to advise her parents to give up the child.
It was only later that Jeevanji Yadhagiri and Jeevanji Dhanalaxmi found out that their eldest child was born with intellectual disability, a cognitive disease hampering communication as well as adaptive skills. But there was only a feeling of pride on Monday morning, when the 20-year-old set a world record timing of 55.07 seconds in the women’s T20 400m final, also qualifying for the Paris Paralympics.
Deepthi broke the earlier world record of 55.12 seconds set by USA’s Breanna Clark. Aysel Onder of Turkey won the silver (55.19) while Lizanshela Angulo of Ecuador (56.68) won the bronze.
“She was born during the solar eclipse and her head was very small at birth along with the lips and nose being a bit unusual. Every villager who saw her and some of our relatives would call Deepthi pichi (mental) and kothi (monkey) and tell us to send her to an orphanage. Today, seeing her become the world champion in a far-off country proves that she is indeed a special girl,” an emotional Dhanalaxmi told The Indian Express from village Kalleda in Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh.
With the village’s population of 5,000 mostly relying on cotton and mango farming, Yadhagiri relied on the family’s half acre land apart from working as a labourer on other farms. It was on the death of his father Ramachandria that Yadhagiri had to sell his land.
Deepthi Jeevanji crosses the finish line to win the gold medal with a new world record timing of 55.07 seconds in the women’s T20 400 m final in the World Para Athletics Championships in Kobe, Japan. (Paralympic Committee of India)
“When my husband’s father died, we had to sell the farm to make ends meet. My husband would earn Rs 100 or Rs 150 a day so there were days when I had to work to support our family, including Deepthi’s younger sister Amulya. Deepthi was always a calm child and spoke very little. But when the village kids would tease her, she would come home and cry. So I would make her sweet rice or, on some days, chicken and that’s what made her happy,” remembers the mother.
It was in 2010 that Deepthi’s talent as a runner was spotted by PT coach Biyani Venkateshwaralu at the Rural Development Foundation (RDF) School in the village. She would often outrace able-bodied students which prompted the coach got her enrolled for 100m and 200m training.
“When I first saw Deepthi, I was impressed by her strength and ability to run naturally. I had to run with her on the track to make her understand the idea of the running track. But she would not talk with anybody. She won the 100m at the state level but was disqualified for lane infringement. So we often had to have other kids running with her,” Venkateshwaralu told The Indian Express.
Deepthi Jeevanji with her parents.
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It was during a 2019 state meet at Khammam where Deepthi caught the attention of Sports Authority of India coach N Ramesh. He visited her house to convince her parents to send her to the SAI Centre in Hyderabad for training.
“Her parents did not even have the bus fare to send her to Hyderabad. When she shifted here, it took me a lot of time to get her adjusted to training at the stadium. We would draw the track on paper and make her understand different tactics as well as the need to focus on competitors. A coach or fellow trainee would always be with her to make her comfortable. We had to deal with her like a child,” says Ramesh.
It was national badminton coach Pullela Gopichand who saw Deepthi at a training session at the stadium and suggested to Ramesh to get her assessed at the National Institute for Empowerment of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in Secunderabad. A three-day test was followed by her competing at the Para Nationals in Bhubaneswar and later going for the world categorisation of her special ability in Australia and Morocco at World Paralympic events with the help of Gopichand Mytrah Foundation.
“An athlete like her needs care mentally, emotionally and financially at every step of her journey. When the category assessment was to be done, the coaches made sure that it was done in time and she was ready to compete at the international level,” Gopichand said.
Deepthi would win the 400m gold at the World Para Grand Prix in Morocco and another title at the Para Oceania-Pacific Games in Australia. Last year, she won the 400m gold medal at the Asian Para Games in Hangzhou with a record time of 56.69 seconds.
“She has a calm mind and it makes our work as coaches easier too. She follows what we tell her and doesn’t complain about fatigue. We had devised a plan of sounding the whistle at every 100m to make her understand the tactics of each segment of a race,” says Ramesh.