At the 60m mark, Dilip Mahudu Gavit was nowhere… but that didn’t mean anything. After all, Dilip wasn’t even supposed to be anywhere here, at the 2026 Commonwealth Games, sprinting down the wet Glasgow track, hunting glory for India.
Born in Tora Dongri, a tribal hamlet in Maharashtra’s Nashik, Dilip had lost his right arm after a fall from a tree as a 5-year-old. His parents had taken him to a local ayurveda practitioner who had only bandaged it and sent him along… but an infection had set in, and it got septic. By the time the family sought professional help, his hand had to be amputated.
That didn’t faze the young child, though, and it’s never fazed him since. A competitor from day 1, he participated in races at school level, winning some but always taking part and that caught the eye of Vaijnath Kale. The corporate employee turned coach, virtually adopted Dilip (that was his parents’ condition for letting him train, for they didn’t have the financial wherewithal to let him do it otherwise) and sharpened him into a fine 400m runner.
Kale is one of those small-town coaches around which so much of Indian sports depends, and what started as an intent to give a boy interested in sport a fair chance soon became something more, as Dilip stayed with him, as “one of his own children” in Dilip’s words. The runner’s talent was such that he regularly competed in open competitions and medalled in quite a few. In 2021, when he reached the U20 finals at the 400m open nationals, he memorably told the Indian Express that “this is where the real fun is. I don’t consider myself disabled. In fact, I am in no way inferior to the other athletes.” He kept showing it: at the Khelo India Youth Games in June 2022, for instance, he was part of Maharashtra’s bronze winning team in the boys’ 4x400m relay.
His focus soon shifted to para-events, though, and that’s when he reached the next level. In 2023, he won Asian Games gold in the 400m T47. The next year he competed in the Paralympics.
As stunning as his story is, though, it’s not his physical impairment that should have kept him from being anywhere near this 100m CWG final on Wednesday. It’s the other key fact that you may have glossed over in his biography: he’s a 400m runner. And 400m runners don’t usually turn up to the biggest international meets and win anything in the 100m. Dilip had only entered the sprint because his one-lap race had been cut from the pared-down Games programme. Having always run the 100m to get faster in the 400m — even if he had medaled at national level 100m sprints before — it took a different kind of focused training from coach Kale to convert him into a focused 100m sprinter; but so fast was he that he qualified for the CWG easily. Dilip was simply determined to add a Commonwealth medal to the Asiad gold he already had.
But after 60m, he was nowhere near the medals. It had been the start of a 400m runner, not explosive but steady, and three others hared away ahead of him: Ghana’s Hayford Addai and England’s Kevin Santos on the outside, and a lane across from Dilip, compatriot Mohammed Basil M. At that point, Dilip was in competition for fourth place with Australia’s Jaydon Page (last edition’s silver medalist in this event).
Then, as the race entered the stretch where the sprinters tire and generally rely on the massive momentum developed with their explosive starts, Dilip came into his own. Stepping on the accelerator, Dilip ate up the ground over the last 40m, leaving Page in the dust before going even harder to overhaul both Santos and Basil (who’d been having a duel for the top spot from the start – and would have been sure they were fighting for gold and silver). Appearing out of nowhere, he raced past them and hit the finish line in 10.71s, the Games Record tumbling in his wake.
Basil, the 100m T47 national champion, took silver. From Veliyancode in Kerala’s Malappuram district, Basil had lost his arm at birth and much like Dilip had competed in open competitions (but at a more local level) before he was introduced to para sport last year. The rise has been spectacular, and silver on international debut simply served to underline it.
The race, though, as day 6 of the Commonwealth Games for India, was Dilip Mahadu Gavit’s. The 400m sprinter had shown up for the 100m party and taken over in stunning fashion… and won India it’s third gold of the 2026 CWG.
Source: ESPN.in
