Day 5 at the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Para Games turned into a historic Friday for India as the contingent breached the 100-medal mark, powered by two stunning world records and five gold medals across athletics, badminton and archery.
The morning session at the Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium set the tone. Debutant Sandeep tore down the straight in the men's 400 metres T64 final, stopping the clock at 52.28 seconds to shatter the T44 world record and claim gold on his very first appearance at the Asian Para Games. The mark bettered the previous world standard held by Saudi Arabia's Nour Alsana by more than half a second — a huge margin at this level of sprinting.
Alsana himself finished second in 53.13 seconds for silver, while India's Ajay Kumar completed a double podium for the country, taking bronze in 53.61 seconds, a time that was itself inside the previous Games record. China's Huang Ruihua finished fourth with a personal best of 54.39 seconds.
Sandeep finished comfortably clear of the field, never looking threatened once he hit the home straight, and the margin of more than half a second over the old world standard is the kind of gap that usually takes years to erase. The race brought together athletes from the T44 and T64 classifications, which cover lower-limb impairments and are often contested together, with Sandeep competing in the T44 category.
Barely had the celebration died down when Haney took centre stage in the men's javelin throw F37/38 final. The Indian produced a monstrous 60.49-metre throw to smash the world record and seize gold. His effort earned him 1,116 Raza points, the scoring system used when the F37 and F38 classifications compete together to account for the different impairment levels.
Iran's Hormoz Seidikazpounji claimed silver with a personal-best 50.68 metres, worth 1,009 Raza points, while China's Yu Chengjie took bronze with an Asian record of 53.66 metres and 943 points. That the podium also featured an Asian record and a personal best, both overshadowed by Haney's colossal throw, only underlined the scale of the Indian's achievement.
The Raza-points calculation explains why Seidikazpounji finished ahead of Yu despite the Chinese thrower recording the longer distance.
The gold rush continued on the badminton courts, where India staged an all-Indian final in the men's singles SL3. Nitesh Kumar defeated compatriot Pramod Bhagat 21-18, 21-16 in a high-quality contest between two Paralympic champions — Nitesh the Paris 2024 gold medallist, Bhagat the Tokyo 2020 champion — to take gold, with Bhagat settling for silver.
It was a fitting headline act for a programme in which India has long been a para-badminton powerhouse, and the straight-games scoreline underlined Nitesh's control of the big points.
Naveen Sivakumar added a second badminton gold of the day in the men's singles SL4 category, overcoming Indonesia's Fredy Setiawan 21-9, 21-17 with a composed performance in which he raced through the opening game and closed out the second without panic. India also picked up two silver medals from the women's singles finals.
Thulasimathi Murugesan fell 18-21, 11-21 to China's Yang Qiuxia in the SU5 final, while Nithya Sre Sumathy Sivan went down 12-21, 13-21 to China's Li Fengmei in the SH6 final.
Para archery delivered another golden moment as Harvinder Singh and Vijay Sundi defeated the Chinese pair 5-1 to win the men's recurve doubles title. There was silver too for the women's recurve doubles pair of Pooja Jatyan and Bhawna Choudhary, who lost to China in the final.
The athletics track and field contributed further podium finishes. Parmod Bijarnia retained his silver medal in the men's 1500 metres T46, clocking 4:09.65, while Nimisha secured silver in the women's long jump T47 with a best effort of 5.37 metres. The long jump gold went to Sri Lanka's Dhananjana Wickramasinghe, whose 5.52-metre leap set a new Games record, fifteen centimetres ahead of the Indian.
India's medal harvest extended to para table tennis, where Jehan Madan and Shubham Wadhwa took bronze in the men's doubles Class MD4 after losing their semi-final to South Korea's Jincheol Park and Kyunghyun Kim. In shooting, there was promise for the days ahead as Avani Lekhara qualified in first place for the final of the women's 50-metre rifle 3 positions SH1 event, with compatriot Mona Agarwal qualifying sixth.
The day's medals took India's overall tally to 100 — 25 gold, 32 silver and 43 bronze — keeping the country fourth in the overall standings behind leaders China, who had 333 medals at the time of writing. It is the second consecutive Asian Para Games at which India has crossed the century mark, a landmark that once seemed far beyond reach.
Just over a decade ago, India's para-sport programme operated on the margins of public attention; the journey from there to back-to-back triple-digit hauls at Asia's biggest para-sport event is one of the standout transformation stories in Indian sport.
Even more significantly, India is now within touching distance of its best-ever Asian Para Games haul. That benchmark stands at 111 medals from the 2022 Hangzhou edition, which was held in 2023, and with one-and-a-half days of competition still to come, the contingent needs just 12 more medals to set a new record. Given the form shown on Friday across athletics, badminton, archery, shooting and table tennis, the record looks firmly in sight.
The remaining programme offers further medal chances, with Avani Lekhara among those chasing gold after topping qualification.
For a contingent that arrived in Japan with the weight of rising expectations, Day 5 was the statement performance. Two world records in a single morning — one on the track by a debutant in his first major championship, one in the throwing circle — an all-Indian badminton final featuring two Paralympic champions, and medals across six disciplines show a squad with genuine depth rather than a handful of star names.
The records broken on Friday may not stand forever, but the direction of travel for Indian para sport is unmistakable. India has not just crossed the 100-medal mark, it has done so in style, and the best may yet be to come.
(Reporting based on NDTV Sports and The Indian Express.)