Born with Down Syndrome, Sneha Verma of Kharghar in Mumbai won gold in 50m freestyle aquatics in the Special Olympics Games in Los Angeles in 2015, proving that where there is will, there is a way.

Introduced to swimming from a very early age, it wasn’t easy for Sneha to pick up even basic skills like breathing or maneuvering underwater.

“When Sneha used to swim, initially, there was no coordination. She would just splash the water. It took us a lot of time to tell her, how she should breathe or cut the water. Her palms would never close, she would always leave her fingers open. As a result, she could never catch up the speed. For a normal child, that would be a very easy task,” her mother recalled.

The turning point in her life was when joined the Swami Brahmananda Pratishthan school in Belapur where she honed her swimming skills.

“The school sent her to several district-level competitions and that’s when she was picked up by the Special Olympics team and she went for the national championship to Bengaluru, when she was 19 years old. It was her first time away from home and we were worried if she’ll be able to manage her everyday routine without our support but she was way more independent than we thought. Sneha came back victorious with three gold medals, two silver medals and two bronze medals and that led to her selection for the Special Olympics,” her mother said.

But she wasn’t done beating the odds in her life as in 2016, when she was training for Paralympics, doctor’s found that her eardrum had perforated and an internal bone had eroded. Still hellbent on swimming, she was then advised to swim with earplugs. Following this, she won the gold in Paralympics competition but her situation worsened, thus ending her career in competitive swimming.

“I can’t swim anymore, it hurts when I put my head in the water. There’s pus in my ear and it hurts a lot. But I’m not upset that I can’t compete, my aim was to make the country proud and I did that. Dance is my passion, it has always been, I’ll focus on that now. I’ve also picked table tennis as a sport and with the right training, I’ll hopefully champion that,” Sneha said.

H/T: The Quint