Grit and perseverance: Priyesha, Dhanush win Deaflympics gold

PUNE:

Priyesha Deshmukh

, the Pune shooter, who had 98 per cent hearing loss a year after her birth, won gold in the 10m air rifle mixed event with

Dhanush Srikanth

at the 24th

Deaflympics

in Caxias do Sul, Brazil, on Saturday.


Priyesha and Dhanush defeated Germany's

Sebastian Herrmany

and

Sabrina Eckert

16-10 in the gold-medal match. This was Dhanush's second gold of the Games after having won the men's 10m air rifle individual title.

Hearing loss was not the only hurdle that Priyesha, 29, had to clear. She suffers from dyslexia and dyscalculia, a combination that makes pursuing a technical sport like shooting nothing less than impossible.

“You can learn to communicate after some time, but overcoming dyslexia and dyscalculia is never easy. For example, it is very simple for us to understand a command like ‘go left’ or ‘step forward’, but it isn’t easy for her. In a technical sport like shooting, there are so many instructions, techniques to follow. But each command that appears easy to the instructor, was an uphill task for Priyesha,” Priyesha’s coach and Olympian shooter

Anjali Bhagwat

told TOI.

“It was not easy for her to understand the alignment of the rifle, adjusting the sight just by following instructions. She would write it down to understand better,” the coach said. “Other than shooting, she had to work on all these aspects to win a gold medal in her second Deaflympics,” Bhagwat added.

Priyesha had won bronze at the 1st World Deaf Shooting Championships held in Kazan, but winning a medal at the Deaflympics was her dream. Priyesha had participated in the 2017 edition of the Deaflympics, an Olympics for the hearing-impaired athletes, but had to stay content with a 10th-place finish.

“She lost her mother when she was young and was very close to her grandmother, who always reminded her of her goal of winning a medal at the Deaflympics. Priyesha was very upset when her grandmother passed away during the first wave of Covid-19. However, she returned to the range to fulfil her grandmother’s dream,” Priyesha’s father Sharadrao Deshmukh said. “She suffers from oral dyslexia, where she struggles to express herself properly. But she worked really hard on any deterrence that would stop her from winning a medal at the Deaflympics,” he said.