One of India's most decorated para athletes, Deepa Malik has made the country proud by winning a silver medal at the Rio 2016 Paralympics. She achieved the feat in the women's shot put F53 event where she threw her personal best 4.61m in her sixth and final attempt to finish second behind Bahrain's Fatema Nedham, who registered 4.76m mark to win gold.?
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The 45-year-old is an all-rounder in the truest sense. She is an accomplished swimmer, adventure sports junkie, biker and entrepreneur and has had her name entered into the Limca Book of Record not once, but four times.
BCCL
Suffering a spinal tumor in 1999, which required three surgeries and 183 stitches between her shoulder blades and left her paralyzed from the waist down, did not stop Deepa from chasing and achieving her dreams.
A recipient of the Arjuna Award in 2012 for her achievements as a swimmer, she has swum across the Yamuna River against the current, covered a distance of over 3,000kms from Chennai to Delhi on a customized motorbike and scaled nine high altitude motorable passes in Ladakh in nine days. In fact, Deepa was the first paraplegic athlete to attempt to cover such difficult terrain.
BCCL
She started off her career at the age of 36 as an out an out adventure sportswoman. She has the unique distinction of being the only person with disability to get a official rally license from Federation Motor Sports Club of India. She's participated in the toughest car rallies - Raid de Himalaya (2009) and Desert Storm (2010).?
She also has to her credit 54 gold medals at the national level and 13 at the international level across sports, including swimming and in the javelin throw and shot put. Apart from this, she even represented the Rajasthan women's cricket team.
BCCL
Born in Bhaiswal in Haryana, Deepa was a self-obsessed adrenalin junkie from a young age. Among her teenage passions was motorbiking, and in an interview she even admitted to being convinced to get married at the age of 20 "just for a bike". The bike, for the record, was a Kawasaki Bajaj 100cc.