Sheetal Devi — Born Without Arms, World No. 1
In Aichi–Nagoya the 19-year-old from Kishtwar equalled one world record, set another with Toman Kumar and won two golds inside two hours. It was her first Asian Para Games since a rule change made her rebuild the way she holds the bow.
Sheetal Devi’s Thursday at Okazaki Chuo Sogo Park held two finals. In the first, she and Toman Kumar beat Indonesia’s Teodora Audi Ayudia Ferelly and Ken Swagumilang 151-148 for the compound mixed team title, India’s first archery gold of these Asian Para Games. Less than two hours later she was back on the line against Singapore’s Nur Syahidah Alim, the archer she had beaten for the individual title in Hangzhou three years ago. After two ends she was four points down, 55-59. She shot two perfect ends, six 10s, to go two points up, and closed with three 9s. She won 142-139, and kept her title.
The golds finished a week in which she had already rewritten part of the record book. On Monday she scored 704 out of 720 in the ranking round, equalling the world record Türkiye’s Öznur Cüre Girdi set at the Paris Paralympics, and her 704 added to Toman’s 698 made 1,402, a mixed team world record. On Tuesday she scored 149 out of a possible 150 in an elimination match, one better than the world record Britain’s Jessica Stretton had held for seven years, according to agency reports. On Wednesday she and Payal Nag lost the women’s doubles final to China, 141-150. She leaves Japan as she left Hangzhou, with two golds and a silver.
She is 19. She was born in Loidhar, a village in the Kishtwar district of Jammu & Kashmir, with phocomelia, a rare congenital condition, and has never had arms. She holds the bow up with her right foot, draws the string with her right shoulder and lets the arrow go with a small device held in her mouth. What made this week different from Hangzhou was the year that came before it. After Paris, World Archery barred the bow from touching her heel, and the grip that had won her a Paralympic medal had to be rebuilt from the toes. “She had to start from zero again,” her coach, Gaurav Sharma, said last November, in Gulf News’s report. She came to Nagoya as world No. 1 and the reigning world champion. She leaves with the evidence that the rebuild held.
Four days in Aichi
The ranking round set the week up. Her 704 came in two halves of 352, with 32 Xs, the innermost ring, and 25 more 10s. It raised her own Asian record from 698 and the Games record from 680, which she had set in Hangzhou. Payal was fifth with 675, and their combined 1,379 put India top of the doubles seedings.
The 149 came against Hong Kong’s Chan Yuen Wah in the round of 16, one point short of a perfect match. In the semi-final she beat Japan’s Aya Shinohara 145-137. In the mixed team she and Toman beat Japan 154-147 in the quarter-final and Chinese Taipei’s Lee Yun-hsien and Yang Jyun-kai 142-141 to reach Thursday’s final, where India led 38-37 after the first end and 77-73 after the second and held on.
| Day | Event | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 19 | Ranking round, women’s compound32 Xs; equals the world record; Asian and Games records | 704 |
| Mon 19 | Mixed team ranking, with Toman KumarHer 704 and his 698; world record, up from 1,400 | 1,402 |
| Tue 20 | Round of 16 v Chan Yuen Wah (HKG)Reported as a world record for a 15-arrow match; old mark 148 | 149 |
| Tue 20 | Semi-final v Aya Shinohara (JPN) | 145–137 |
| Wed 21 | Women’s doubles final, with Payal NagSilver; lost to Xu Xueqing and Zhao Jing (CHN) | 141–150 |
| Thu 22 | Mixed team final, with Toman KumarGold; beat Ferelly and Swagumilang (INA); India’s first archery gold | 151–148 |
| Thu 22 | Individual final v Nur Syahidah Alim (SGP)Gold; from 55–59 down; India’s 17th gold of the Games | 142–139 |
The Indonesian pair in the mixed final had history with her. In the Paris quarter-final she and Rakesh Kumar beat Ferelly and Swagumilang 154-143. Toman, her partner here, is the reigning men’s compound world champion. By the end of Thursday India had 88 medals, 21 of them gold, and were fourth on the table, National Herald reported.
The same final, twice
In Hangzhou on 27 October 2023 she was 16, and the shape of the final was different. She trailed Alim by one point after the first end, two after the second and three after the third, 84-87 with six arrows left. She shot six straight 10s and won 144-142. In Nagoya the hole was deeper and came sooner, and she was in front with an end to spare: two perfect ends took her from four down to two up, and the last end, 27 to 26, settled it.
| After | Hangzhou 2023 | Nagoya 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| End 1 | 28–29 | 29–29 |
| End 2 | 56–58 | 55–59 |
| End 3 | 84–87 | 85–? |
| End 4 | 114–? | 115–113 |
| Final | 144–142 | 142–139 |
The two Games produced the same haul. In Hangzhou she also won the mixed team with Rakesh Kumar and a doubles silver with Sarita, and became the first Indian woman to win two golds at a single Asian Para Games, ThePrint reported. She now has four.
Loidhar
She was born on 10 January 2007, the eldest daughter of Maan Singh and Shakti Devi, who farm rice and vegetables and keep goats. A younger sister, Shivani, also shoots. She writes with her feet and works a phone with them. Before the sport, she told Scroll, “Main kuch nahi karti thi [I did not do anything]. I used to just go to school.”
The Indian Army’s Rashtriya Rifles noticed her at a youth sports event it ran in Kishtwar; the year is given as 2019, 2020 or 2021, depending on the source. The unit backed her schooling and medical care. In April 2021 Being You, a Bengaluru storytelling start-up, made contact, and that year she was assessed at a clinic in Bengaluru for prosthetic arms, which did not work for her. “I was told by a lot of people Sheetal will never use the prosthetics,” Being You’s co-founder, Preethi Rai, told Scroll. A physiotherapist’s tests found something else: powerful legs and a strong core. ESPN tied her upper-body strength to years of climbing trees in the village.
Kuldeep Vedwan, who has coached para-archery since 2007 and has led the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board academy at Katra since 2017, first spoke to her on a Zoom call in December 2021. “She had no idea what archery was,” he told Scroll. She moved to Katra, about 200 km from home, in August 2022. “I kept wondering how can I do this… I don’t have arms,” she said.
Foot, shoulder, jaw
Vedwan and his fellow coach Abhilasha Chaudhary had no armless woman to copy. They had Matt Stutzman, the American who shoots with his feet and took Paralympic silver at London 2012. She shoots seated, raising the bow with her right leg and steadying it with her foot on the riser. She draws the string back with her right shoulder and lets the arrow go with a small device Vedwan made, which she holds in her mouth. She began at 50 to 100 arrows a day and built to 300, Swarajya reported.
She met Stutzman at the 2023 World Championships in Pilsen, where he helped refine her technique. By Paris there were four armless archers at the Games, and she was the only woman. Stutzman, who won gold there, had been helping her since the 2023 world championships in Pilsen, where he told her coach that her peep sight was too small, World Archery reported.
Pilsen was also her first world final. She had fallen ill on the trip and was taken to hospital after her semi-final, Scroll reported, then lost the final 138-140 to Cüre Girdi. The silver made her the first armless woman to win a medal at the World Championships and earned India a quota place for Paris. She had been shooting for eleven months, World Archery reported; the figure is often printed for Hangzhou, which came three months later. In January 2024 she received the Arjuna Award from President Droupadi Murmu.
Back to zero
Paris went past her records and not quite past her rivals. In the ranking round she scored 703, beyond the 698 world record Phoebe Paterson Pine had set earlier that month, but Cüre Girdi shot 704 in the same round. She lost her round-of-16 match 137-138 to Chile’s Mariana Zúñiga. In the mixed team her 703 and Rakesh’s 696 made 1,399, a world record. They lost the semi-final to Iran on a shoot-off after a 152-152 tie and took bronze by beating Italy’s Eleonora Sarti and Matteo Bonacina 156-155, equalling the Paralympic record. At 17 she was India’s youngest Paralympic medallist.
In November 2024 she moved to Patiala to train under Sharma, the long-time coach of the Paralympic champion Harvinder Singh. The rule change followed. The bow could now touch only her toes and the front of her foot, never the heel. “When the new rules were put in place, she had to completely relearn her technique,” Sharma told World Archery. “It was mentally and physically exhausting.” He told the Deccan Herald she needed six months to adapt, and described swelling and bleeding in her toes. “There was so much pain in my leg,” she said. “The soreness in my toes is still fresh.”
In Gwangju in September 2025 she beat Cüre Girdi 146-143 in the world final, finishing with a perfect 30, and became the first armless woman to win the title. She added a team silver with Sarita and a mixed bronze with Toman. “This win is very important to me,” she told World Archery, “to prove wrong all the doubts I’d been hearing for a long time.”
Able-bodied, and not alone
A few weeks after Gwangju she went to the national junior selection trials in Sonipat and finished third among more than 60 able-bodied archers, matching the top qualifier’s 703. She was picked for India’s junior team for an Asia Cup stage in Jeddah, the first Indian para archer selected for an able-bodied national side, World Archery said, though ESPN reported the stage was later cancelled. A year earlier, on Kaun Banega Crorepati, she had said she hoped to compete alongside able-bodied archers. In March World Archery named her its Para Archer of the Year for 2025. “This one feels deeply personal,” she wrote.
The 2026 season gave her a rival from her own team. Payal, a quadruple amputee from Balangir in Odisha who lost all four limbs to a live wire at a brick kiln in 2015, took up archery looking up to Sheetal, the Deccan Herald reported. In April, in Bangkok, she beat Sheetal 139-136 in the World Archery Para Series final; they won the doubles together. In September, in Ahmedabad, Sheetal won her first individual Series title: 144-144 against Kazakhstan’s Aizada Seidan, then a 10 to Seidan’s 9 in the shoot-off.
| When | Record and holder | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2024 | Ranking round, women’s compoundPhoebe Paterson Pine (GBR), earlier that month | 698 |
| Aug 2024 | Ranking round, women’s compoundÖznur Cüre Girdi (TUR), Paris; Sheetal 703 in the same round | 704 |
| Oct 2026 | Ranking round, women’s compoundSheetal Devi, Nagoya: equalled | 704 |
| Aug 2024 | Mixed team rankingSheetal and Rakesh Kumar, Paris | 1,399 |
| Sep 2026 | Mixed team rankingSheetal and Rakesh Kumar, Ahmedabad | 1,400 |
| Oct 2026 | Mixed team rankingSheetal and Toman Kumar, Nagoya | 1,402 |
| 2019 | 15-arrow matchJessica Stretton (GBR) | 148 |
| Oct 2026 | 15-arrow matchSheetal Devi v Chan Yuen Wah, Nagoya | 149 |
What comes next
All three marks in that table now carry her name: one shared with Cüre Girdi, one with a partner, one alone. The one thing Paris did not give her was an individual medal. “My next target is the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Para Games, where I hope to defend my title,” she told World Archery after Gwangju. “The Paralympics is always on my mind.” The first half of that is done. The Los Angeles Paralympics are in 2028, and she will be 21.
Sourcing. Nagoya: IANS and PTI via DT Next (19 and 22 October), Morung Express, National Herald (22 October), Open (22 October), Republic, myKhel (20 October) and Possible11 (20 October). Hangzhou 2023: ESPN, Scroll, ThePrint. Early life and coaching: Scroll (2023), Swarajya (2023), Olympics.com, ESPN, Wikipedia. Paris 2024: Olympics.com, Outlook, World Archery, TIME. Rule change and Gwangju: World Archery (October 2025), Gulf News (12 November 2025), PTI via Outlook (6 November 2025), Deccan Herald, ESPN (28 December 2025). 2026 season: Odisha Bytes (4 April), World Archery (30 June, 6 and 9 September), IANS (9 September), The Bridge/PTI (4 September), PTI and IANS (30 March, Para Archer of the Year). Margins in the end-by-end chart are ISJ’s arithmetic from the published scores. Fact-checked on 29 October 2026 against World Archery’s own reports (July 2023 to October 2026), ESPN (27 October 2023) and Wikipedia’s Paris 2024 event pages.
Corrections to the carousel. Slides 5 and 7: “eleven months” of training before the Hangzhou gold — World Archery reported the eleven months at the Pilsen world final in July 2023 (“only 11 months after she began her archery career”), which fits Scroll’s August 2022 move to Katra; by Hangzhou it was about 14 months. The article gives the figure for Pilsen. Slide 6: the quotes “Surrounded by mountains” and “They never made me feel that I was any less than anyone else” — not found in a published source; not used. Slide 7: “ate with a spoon held in them”, “I used to run around the mountains”, the “bechari… that used to hurt” quote, the parents’ “If you want to do it, then do it” quote and “within four months she was hitting targets at 50m” — not found; left out. Slide 8: “I owe this to my family” — her published response to the Para Archer of the Year award (X post, reported by IANS and PTI, 30 March 2026) does not contain it; not used. Slide 8: “parents and brother stayed in Kishtwar” — no brother found; Scroll names a younger sister, Shivani. Slide 10: Stutzman saying archers like her make him “OK with the idea of retiring” — close to what World Archery quoted him saying after helping her in Pilsen (19 July 2023): “I can retire now and be okay with everything”; the article uses World Archery’s account of his advice in Pilsen instead. Slide 10: early backers Meghna Girish and Anupam Kher — named only in Wikipedia; Swarajya credits the Major Akshay Girish Memorial Trust and Being You; only Preethi Rai (Scroll’s spelling) is corroborated. Slide 11: headline “The world record that lasted one round” — her 703 passed the old 698, but Cüre Girdi’s 704 came in the same ranking round, so 703 never stood as the record (Outlook: “misses world record by one point”). Slide 12: “She has called it the hardest challenge of her career” and “Last year, I rarely stepped out for events” — not found; left out. Slide 13: “I had a dream I would become world champion” — not found; her World Archery post-final quotes differ. Slide 13: Cüre Girdi as “world No. 1” — ESPN (28 September 2025, cited by Wikipedia) calls her the defending champion and world No. 1; World Archery calls her the defending champion. Slide 13: “high fever and a stomach bug” — Scroll says only that she fell ill on the trip and was hospitalised after her semi-final. Slide 14: World Archery Para Series 2026 count (4 gold, 2 silver, 2 bronze) — not independently confirmed; ISJ could verify an individual silver and doubles gold in Bangkok, an individual silver at Nové Město and the individual gold in Ahmedabad. Slide 14: TOISA “twice” — not checked; not used. Slide 15: the Deloitte India partnership, Romal Shetty’s quote and the Partnership Meet ovation, “first jewellery brand to sign a para-athlete” and Harper’s Bazaar’s Woman of the Year — not confirmed in sources checked; left out (the ovation was already sourced to her own Instagram post only). Slide 15: the book Against All Odds — the only evidence is her own post. Slide 17: Anand Mahindra’s offer of “any car from the Mahindra range” — only a headline (SheThePeople, “custom car”) was seen; not used.
Flag. Eleven months: see Corrections (slides 5 and 7). The Hangzhou version is widely printed (Wikipedia cites The Indian Express and India Today), so the article mentions it. Army discovery: 2020 (Wikipedia) or 2021 (ESPN, Olympics.com, Swarajya); World Archery (24 November 2023) says she was spotted at a camp in 2019; Scroll gives no year. Asian record before Nagoya: every source puts it at 698, but IANS and PTI say it was set in Bangkok in March, while World Archery reports a 697 at Nové Město in June and a 698 at Ahmedabad in September, each described as an improvement on her Asian record; World Archery’s own Bangkok report (1 April 2026) puts that 698 qualifying round on 1 April, not in March. The article says only that the record stood at 698. Mixed record partner: World Archery (19 October) names Toman Kumar for the 1,402, with Rakesh Kumar her partner for the earlier 1,399 and 1,400; its Toman Kumar profile (12 October) says Rakesh missed Asian Para Games selection after finishing fourth at the national trials. The final: IANS (Morung Express) and National Herald report the two perfect ends; PTI (DT Next) the six 10s and the 27-26 last end; World Archery (24 October) gives the first three ends: 29-29, then 26 to Alim’s 30, then her perfect 30. Morung Express and World Archery (19 October) give her age as 18 — she turned 19 on 10 January (she was reported as 16 at Hangzhou and 17 at Paris, which fits). “Two hours”: PTI says the individual final came “less than a couple of hours” after the mixed gold; official start times were not checked. Mixed team: myKhel reports the 154-147 win over Japan without naming the round; DT Next’s draw put the winner of Iraq v Japan in their quarter-final. Rule change: World Archery dates it only to after Paris, the Deccan Herald to 2025; no effective date was found. Payal Nag: the Deccan Herald says she took up archery looking up to Sheetal; Odisha Bytes does not say so, and World Archery’s profile of Payal (28 February 2026) says Vedwan found her through a Twitter post, quoting her on Sheetal: “She inspires all of us.” Junior trials: PTI and World Archery say more than 60 archers, ESPN 60; World Archery (7 November 2025) does not call the trials or the team junior and does not give the top qualifier’s score. The 149: the 15-arrow match world record is reported by IANS and Possible11 (the carousel’s ledger also cites ANI); World Archery, which reported the 704 and the 1,402 on 19 October, had published no record notice for it by 28 October, so the copy attributes it to agency reports. Quotes not used: Sheetal’s “It used to feel like I am alone… But not anymore” (no source named; not in World Archery’s Bangkok reports or its Payal Nag profile) and Sharma’s “Jo maanga tha, woh mil gaya” (no source named; not in World Archery’s report of the selection). Gaurav Sharma’s “start from zero” is Gulf News’s rendering; PTI has “start from scratch”. Photographs: the identification of her parents in the family photograph (slide 6) and of her mother on the cover is ISJ’s and has not been confirmed in a published caption.
Photographs. As credited on the slides: Vogue India; Instagram @sheetal_archery; Getty Images.
