HANGZHOU, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — 52-year-old Japanese bicycle owner Keiko Sugiura emerged as a powerful medal contender on the ongoing Hangzhou Asian Para Games after she clinched two medals and broke the Games file twice.
Sugiura claimed a silver medal within the girls’s C1-3 3000m particular person pursuit on October 23 after dashing the earlier C3 class file within the qualifying spherical within the morning.
In the ladies’s C1-3 500m time trial the next day, Sugiura clinched bronze and set a brand new Asian Para Games file for the C3 class with a time of 39.995 seconds.
A longtime biking fanatic, Sugiura was injured throughout a street race, leading to a sequence of a number of contusions, crushed fractures, mind dysfunction and different accidents.
During her rehabilitation, Sugiura picked up para-cycling and returned to the street afterward. In 2021, 50-year-old Sugiura gained the ladies’s C1-5 time trial on the Tokyo Paralympic Games, turning into Japan’s oldest-ever para gold medalist.
“I lost my memory because of the injury, but it made me not afraid to race fearlessly,” mentioned the 52-year-old, who will proceed biking regardless of her age. “I keep trying every year, and every year older is a new challenge for me.”