She took up para athletics in 2020, at her husband’s suggestion. Six years later she is India’s first Commonwealth Games para athletics champion.
India had not won a Commonwealth Games para athletics medal in twenty years. On 27 July in Glasgow, Sharmila Dhankar threw 9.81 metres in the women’s shot put F57 and won it outright.
The throw was a season’s best. It made her India’s first Commonwealth Games gold medallist in para athletics, and the first Indian woman to win a para athletics medal at the Games.
A Career That Began in 2020
Sharmila was introduced to sport by her husband and began her para athletics career in 2020 under coach Tek Chand.
Within a year she won the national championship title in 2021. She has since become one of India’s leading para throwers in the F57 shot put and discus, setting several national records.
The F57 class covers athletes who throw from a seated position, secured to a fixed frame. It removes the leg drive that able-bodied throwers depend on and places almost all the work in the trunk and the throwing arm.
The Games in Between
The Commonwealth Games in 2022 did not go to plan for her. What followed was not a single breakthrough but a run of consistent international results and national records that rebuilt her standing.
She qualified for Glasgow as India’s top-ranked athlete in her event. Six years separate her first day in the sport from a Commonwealth title, which is a short career by the standards of throwing events.
A Second Medal, After a Protest
India took a second medal in the same final. Shilpa K Shyla finished with bronze after a protest overturned the mark of a Nigerian athlete.
Sharmila’s gold was one of six Indian medals on 27 July, the country’s most productive day of the Games to that point, alongside silvers for Sarvesh Kushare in the high jump and for weightlifters Gyaneshwari Yadav and Valluri Ajaya Babu, and bronze for Bindyarani Devi.
The Wise Take
Twenty years without a para athletics medal at these Games is not a statement about Indian athletes. It is a statement about how recently the pathway was built: classification systems, coaching, competition calendars and funding that make a career like Sharmila’s possible at all. She started in 2020 and won in 2026, which suggests the pathway now works when someone enters it. The open question is how many people can find the entrance. Most Indians who acquire a disability in adulthood are never told that competitive sport is available to them, and Sharmila heard it from her husband rather than from any institution.
