The swimmer: Husnah Kukundakwe, Uganda
Three years ago Husnah Kukundakwe became the youngest person to compete at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo. At 14, she was the only member of Uganda’s swimming team. She came sixth in the first heat of the 100m breaststroke.
“The experience was like touching the clouds,” she says. “That is exactly where I felt I had reached. They say the sky is the limit, and of course I wanted to push past it.”
In Paris she will compete in three events. She hopes to make at least one final, and perhaps even win a medal.
“I really do think I have a chance, I’ve seen progress,” says Kukundakwe, now 17. She reached the final of the 100m breaststroke in the para swimming world championships in the UK last year.
She won one silver and two bronze medals at a para swimming world series event in Italy earlier this year. In another career highlight, she won six medals (including two golds) at the Islamic Solidarity Games in 2022.
Kukundakwe, who lives with her family in Kampala, was born without her right forearm and with an impairment to her left hand. “Culturally when you give birth to a child with a disability, it’s a curse on the entire family,” she says. Some parents lock disabled children in the house, she adds. Growing up, she faced discrimination from her peers at school, who laughed at her. She wore a jumper, despite the heat, to hide her arm.
She first started splashing around in the pool at nursery school. Her mother, now her biggest supporter, wasn’t keen at first but Kukundakwe persisted. Wearing a swimming costume started to make her feel more comfortable and free.
She started entering competitions with able-bodied swimmers and won a prize for being the most inspirational competitor. She became known at school for her talent and her confidence grew. There are no Olympic-size 50-metre pools in Kampala so she trained at a 25-metre pool, 18km from her home.
Her mother also encouraged her to ditch the jumper for a T-shirt. She visits schools to share her story. “It was a gradual process,” she says. “Eventually I realised this is how I was meant to be. I’m glad I got to where I am now.”
Kukundakwe had no idea para swimming existed until her coach spoke to her parents, when she was 10, about an opportunity to swim with others living with disabilities.
“I was in awe because I didn’t know there were people like me who were also swimming. So I started Googling and watching videos from the Paralympics on YouTube,” she says.
To become an official para swimmer, she secured classification at an event in Kenya. In 2019, she competed in her first world series in Singapore and later that year, went to the world championships in London and began to think about how to qualify for Tokyo in 2020.
When Covid hit, she kept fit by jogging with her siblings, and held Zoom meetings with her coach. Her first event after lockdown was the UK leg of the 2020 para swimming world series where a personal best was enough to win her Paralympic qualification.
In her home country perceptions of disability are changing, she says. “The concept of inclusion has started to become more popular in Uganda and I’m looking forward to seeing how much better it can get,” she says.
While she is focused on achieving success in the water, Kukundakwe is mindful that a sports career can be short-lived. She is in full-time education, and wants to be a paediatrician.
For now though, she has her sights on the games: “My lifetime goal is to get a Paralympic medal,” she says. “After all the progress I’ve made from such a young age I’m excited for Paris and the future.”
Words by Sarah Johnson
The sports shooter: Kishmala Talat, Pakistan
“I dream of doing something big and being remembered for that,” says 22-year-old Pakistani Olympic qualifier Kishmala Talat, confident of coming home with gold at the 2024 Paris games.
In a country where men’s cricket dominates the sporting scene, and where firearms are associated with masculinity, representing Pakistan at the Olympics as a shooter is quite a feat.
Talat has won two dozen gold medals and a dozen silvers since she started shooting nine years ago, aged 13, but globally she ranks 37th and 41st in 10m air pistol and 25m sports pistol events respectively. This fails to dampen Talat’s spirits.
“My biggest competitor is me; I am competing with myself and the only way to win is to outperform me,” she says, speaking from Lahore, in Punjab province, where she is training, after which she will go to Jhelum, another Punjab city, to practise at the army marksmanship unit.
With just weeks to go before she heads to Paris, life is a whirlwind of following “an exhausting” daily regimen of eight hours of shooting, followed by a multitude of exercises to build strength, endurance and increase concentration.
“It’s a sport of precision and focus; the more you practise, the better you get,” says Talat. In her time off, she gets as much sleep as possible to “recover and get my energy back”.
It was purely by chance that Talat got into the sport. Both parents serve in the Pakistan army, and one summer her mother took her to an army shooting range. “It was my first time watching girls my age holding a gun; I was totally mesmerised, I knew I wanted to be one of them.”
The ratio was 80 boys to 20 girls back then, but has since improved to almost 60:40 and at some clubs it’s even 50:50.
Although more women are participating in her sport, Talat says men are “fractionally better shooters” because of their anatomy which “does play an important part”, she says.
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But for any sportsperson to shine, “inherent talent is not enough”, it needs to be polished, says Talat, who appreciates having had the opportunity to train with some of the best coaches.
A demanding sport physically and mentally, it requires concentration and sharp reflexes, qualities that have helped her balance studies and sports.
“An elevated heartbeat due to nervousness, a drop of perspiration and releasing or holding breath at the wrong time” makes the difference, she says; winning can be a matter of a decimal point. Elite shooters need intense concentration and focus.
She uses mindfulness training. One technique is “finding a very quiet spot, lighting a candle and gazing at the flickering flame” which she says “calms my nerves”.
Four athletes will be representing Pakistan at the Paris Olympics, including two male shooters, Gulfam Joseph and Ghulam Mustafa Bashir, and javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem. Talat is the only woman and will compete in three events, one a mixed competition where she will team up with Joseph. “I am confident we will bag a medal,” she says.
Pakistan has won just 10 Olympic medals since 1948, and Talat would love to be the first woman to bring one home. She just has to keep her heart from beating too fast.
Words by Zofeen T Ebrahim in Karachi
The runner: Taonere Banda, Malawi
Taonere Banda, 28, is preparing to showcase her running skills on the red dirt track outside a primary school.
She is on familiar ground. About a decade ago, she sat in the classroom here with the woman who is now her coach, Esmie Tambala – although then she was a student and Tambala was her special needs teacher.
Practising every day at 5am, she attracts curiosity from onlookers, but Banda has already made history. As Malawi’s first Paralympic athlete, she is training for Paris where she will compete in the women’s T12-13 1500m.
She qualified for the 2012 London Paralympics too but could not raise the money to go. This time, with support from the Malawi government’s sporting fund, she hopes she will get there.
Banda falls under the functional blindness category. “Sometimes my eyes itch and my vision is very dim,” she says, speaking at Nkhotakota LEA school which has a resource centre for children with disabilities. “I can’t concentrate.”
Tambala, who now acts as her personal trainer on a voluntary basis, says she saw something unique in Banda as a child. “As a trainer, I am impressed with her progress,” she says, checking her watch. “She has done this 100-metre run in 16 seconds.”
She first came to the limelight in 2012 when she took part in a countrywide running competition for disabled people organised by National Initiative for Civic Education . Banda came first and this earned her a passport and an entry for her first international competition in Zambia.
At the Paralympics in Rio she competed in the T13 1500m race. Her performance was initially impressive but she was disqualified for leaving her lane. She believes this was due to her “misunderstanding the instruction and putting in all her energy at once instead of splitting it”.
As she prepares for Paris, she says she will put up her most gallant performance.
Her background and circumstances mean she is at a disadvantage compared with other athletes, her coach says. Banda lacks access to a proper track, sports or gym equipment, and cannot afford to follow the diet of an athlete. Her parents are both dead and she looks after her younger siblings.
She says other competitors often call her the “baby” because of her stature. “I ran very fast to prove them wrong,” she says.
She also has a special message for parents with children like her: “Don’t isolate them. There are different forms of disabilities during Paralympics, and that’s a world stage.”
Words by Charles Pensulo in Nkhotakota, Malawi
