National Paralympic head coach for athletics R. Jeganathan's final words of inspiration and motivation to a tense sprinter Mohamad Ridzuan Mohamad Puzi before the start of the men's 100m T36 race was "Just start sprinting and do not look right or left until you have crossed the line."

Those words seemed to have worked to perfection as Mohamad Ridzuan who was nervous before the start of the final and had to be comforted by Jeganathan, ran the race of his life and true to his coach's words only started looking at his opponents well past the finishing line.

Jeganathan who later hugged and kissed Mohamad Ridzuan for winning the country's first ever gold medal in the Rio Paralympics through the men's T36 100m final (cerebral palsy), said he had always treated the sprinter like his son although he had to be strict during training.

Mohamad Ridzuan set the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro alight by sprinting to a new Paralympics record of 12.07 seconds, surpassing the old mark of 12.25s set by Roman Pavlyk from Ukraine in the 2008 Beijing Paralympics in China.

Mohamad Ridzuan's historic feat to win the country's first ever gold medal in the Paralympics since 1972 (Heidelberg, Germany), seemed to have triggered a gold rush for other members of the Malaysian Paralympics contingent as two other athletes went on to win two gold medals from track and field en route to setting world records.

"In fact before the start of the race, the whole athletics contingent was tense because China's Yang Yifei had beaten Mohamad Ridzuan in the Beijing Open. However, despite a good start, he could sustain the pace in the last 20 metres," said Jeganathan when contacted by Bernama.

Yifei finished second with a time of 12.20s while Rodrigo Parreira da Silva from the host nation took the bronze with 12.54s.

Jeganathan who has been coaching normal athletes (he was the coach for Malaysian long distance ace M. Ramachandran) and Paralympic athletes for almost 20 years now said his next target for Mohamad Ridzuan is the world record.

The current world record of 11.90s is held by Evgenii Shvetsov from Russia.

"He (Mohamad Ridzuan) from Perlis has a personal best of 12.01s, a time he had set to win the gold medal in the World Championships in Doha recently. So, dipping below 12 seconds is not impossible," he said.

The coach said during training he kept pushing Mohamad Ridzuan and even scolded him at times but glad that all the hard work, sacrifices and coaching had paid off. -- BERNAMA