Last updated: 23 Oct 2026 | 16 Views |
Picture a wheelchair fencing piste in Nagoya. The scoreboard reads 8-14. Six points down, one touch from the end. Most of us, in that spot, are mentally packing the bag. Sayasuni Jana was not. She clawed all the way back to 14-14, then lost the final touch, 14-15, to South Korea’s Cho Eun-hye in the women’s épée Category B final at the 2026 Asian Para Games. Silver, technically. But anyone who tells you that medal is light has not looked at that scoreline.
Here’s the thing about Thailand’s para team in Japan this month: it’s one of the best sports stories in the country right now, and I’m not sure we’re talking about it enough.
Let’s start with the numbers, because numbers don’t lie. The Games run October 18-24 across Nagoya and Aichi Prefecture. Thailand sent 282 athletes and set a goal of 24 gold medals, according to Khaosod English. As of October 22, with two days still to go, The Standard has Thailand at 16 gold, 29 silver and 47 bronze, 92 medals in total, seventh in the table.
Now zoom out. At Guangzhou in 2010, Thailand won 20 golds and finished fifth. In 2014 it was 21. In 2018 it was 23. At Hangzhou in 2022, 27 golds, seventh overall. Look at that trend line: it goes up almost every time. So the 24-gold target isn’t a daydream. It’s a target built on a decade and a half of steady climbing. Right now Thailand is eight golds short, but with two days left I’m not ready to call it a miss. And let’s be clear about the neighborhood: China had already passed 100 golds by day three, with Japan and Uzbekistan right behind. Nobody is handing out easy medals here.
But numbers only tell you where the team stands. People tell you why.
Take Nitikorn Jiamphiriyakul, the S14 swimmer. He won the 200m freestyle for his first gold, then took the 100m butterfly in 57.56 seconds, a new Games record, for his second. He also grabbed silver in the 100m breaststroke. Three medals out of one pool. That’s not a lucky afternoon, that’s an athlete who built a body, and a routine, that holds up event after event after event.
Then there’s Wisit Kingmanalao, who beat China’s Feng Yanke 15-7 in the men’s épée Category B final to deliver Thailand’s first fencing gold of these Games. Which brings us back to Sayasuni, who is competing in nine events, the most of her career, and had already banked four medals by the time that silver arrived, with five events still left: two silvers and a bronze before this latest silver. Think about what that schedule demands. Nine events. Day after day. Forget the medal count for a second: just showing up and being sharp that many times is its own gold-medal discipline.
And if there’s one sport where I’d argue Thailand has built a dynasty, it’s boccia. On October 21, Thailand won three golds in a single day. Wisanu Huadpradit beat Singapore’s Jovin Tan 4-1 in the men’s BC1 individual, Thailand’s fifth straight Asian Para Games boccia gold, a streak that now spans 16 years. Phornchok Lapyen won the BC4 final 5-3 over Hong Kong’s Leung Yuk Wing. Witun Chantakhad took the BC3 final 4-3, a one-point squeaker.
Sixteen years. Think about that. In sports, we love to talk about dynasties: the teams that win and win and win. But a dynasty isn’t an accident. It’s a system. It’s coaches handing down technique, veterans teaching rookies, a whole culture that decides what “good enough” means and then refuses to accept it. The difference is that nobody here got paid like a free agent. They just kept showing up.
Here’s the part I find most interesting, and I think it’s what a medal is really about: adaptation. In para sport, no two athletes have the same body or the same limits. Every athlete has to build their own method, their own posture, their own timing, their own way of managing fatigue. You don’t copy a champion; you figure out your version of the work. That takes thousands of attempts, and most of them fail. When we see someone smiling with a medal around their neck, we’re seeing the final line of a very long spreadsheet of trial and error.
Which is why Sayasuni’s 14-15 loss might be the most useful result of the whole tournament. She now knows, from direct experience, that she can come back from 8-14. You can’t buy that kind of knowledge. You can only earn it, and she paid full price. Not a gold medal, sure, but a lesson that will outlast any color of metal.
That’s what I love about this kind of story. It doesn’t need hype, because the details do the work. A six-point deficit, a 16-year streak, a 57.56-second swim. You can’t script that, and you wouldn’t dare. A medal isn’t just a disc of metal on a ribbon. It’s evidence. Evidence that somebody woke up early, trained when they didn’t feel like it, lost, hurt, and got back up, hundreds or thousands of times, before the one moment when someone finally hung it around their neck. When you hold a medal from this level of competition, you’re holding the sum of someone’s patience, not the product of luck.
So what do we do with all this? Keep watching. The Games close on October 24, and I’d bet the gold count moves again before the final ceremony. Whether Thailand ends up at 24 or not, 282 athletes just showed us something worth applauding.
Maybe the real achievement isn’t the number on the table. Maybe it’s the picture of someone trailing 8-14 who decided to keep fighting. That’s the picture we should all take home and put to use in our own lives.
