World Para Athletics Championships 2025 – Salum Kashafali: “What’s worse than not being able to see is being invisible”
When you are Salum Ageze Kashafali, you get to be the centre of attention.
When the 32-year-old crossed the finish line in the final of the men’s T13 100m race at the Para Athletics World Championships in a blistering new world record of 10.42 seconds at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on Sunday, Kashfali mugged at the direction of the cameras. He took off his jersey and held the Norwegian flag up behind him. He smashed a plastic water bottle on the floor in front of him. When his coach draped him with a garland of plastic gold flowers, he wore them and flexed his sizable biceps.
It’s clear Kashafali likes being seen.
But there was a time when he thought that would never happen.
Ten years ago, Kashafali — then 22 — was studying mathematics in university. He had been competing in the men’s 100m in Norway, routinely placing on the podium. All of a sudden, he lost the ability to see.
Initially, he thought it was due to overwork. Doctors then suspected a heart issue, but it eventually turned out to be Stargardt’s disease, a genetic disorder that leads to a progressive loss of vision.
In Kashafali’s case, there was no progression. One day, out of the blue, he was left just about able to make out shapes that were a meter ahead of him.
“I didn’t want to live. I didn’t want to be disabled,” Kashafali recalls. “You know how people with disability are looked at. You know what’s worse than not being able to see? It’s being unseen. It’s being invisible”.
After a year of rehabilitation, Kashafali realised he had to find a way to navigate the world.
“I felt ashamed of myself. Suddenly, I felt even smaller than I was. I was sad and depressed. But I had to come to my senses. I reminded myself of where I’d come from.”
“I grew up in a slum in the town of Kivu in Goma in Congo. When it rained, the water would flow through our house. I used to have to beg for food everyday. In the middle of all of that, we had a war and had to flee. There were bullets flying around me, and I had members of my family killed in front of me. I spent a year in a refugee camp before my family and I were able to get refugee status in Norway. When I thought about all of that, I realised how lucky I was to even be where I was. I needed to find a way forward,” he remembers.
It was running that would provide a path. Kashafali initially didn’t want to be known as a disabled athlete. But when his coach took him to a para athletics competition, he came away with a change of heart.
“These guys with disabilities were running so fast. They were jumping so high. I thought if they could do that, so could I,” he says.
And so a year after he lost his sight, Kashafali decided to run again. He could barely see the outline of the track and had perhaps a meter of forward depth perception. But he persisted. “I trained for five hours each day, seven days a week. After a year, I took part in and won the Norwegian national championships. I hadn’t won it when I had full vision, but I ended up winning it when I couldn’t see,” he says.
Paralympic champion
Simultaneously, he started running in the visually impaired category (T13 is for athletes with a moderate visual impairment and who can recognise contours from a distance of two to six metres).
Two years after he started competing, Kashafali won gold at the Tokyo Paralympics with a new world record of 10.43s.
Although he was unable to defend his title in Paris, Kashafali’s passion for the sport did not flicker. Each time he runs, he hopes he can run faster.
This comes with its own challenges. With his sight as poor as it is, the faster he runs, the harder Kashafali finds it to see what’s in front of him.
“I can see a couple of meters in front of me, but when I run as fast as I can, I can maybe see a meter in front. I can sort of make out the blue tracks and the lines on the side. My peripheral vision is slightly better, so I can use that to navigate. But what I think really guides me is faith. I think God is my GPS. He’s brought me this far, and I can’t really see, but I have faith that God is putting my feet in the right place.”
There’s no chance Kashafali will slow down. When he describes the 10 or so seconds he spends at full tilt, Kashafali says it’s like he’s meditating.
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“It feels like I’m running from the world. I’m running from everybody. I’m running towards my dreams, towards my goals. I’m running from all my worries, all my stress. For 10 seconds, it feels as if I’m by myself. For 10 seconds, I’m feeling the best feeling in the world,” he says.
In those ten and a bit seconds, Kashafali says he gets to be like a child once again, but this time, do it right. “When I was a child, my life was about war and poverty and being a refugee. It’s only now that I can run for fun,” he says.
With a new World Record under his belt, Kashafali hopes for even bigger accomplishments.
“My ultimate goal is to compete at both the Olympics and Paralympics. In 2027, I want to go and compete in as many competitions as possible to get as many points as possible so that I can qualify for the Los Angeles Games. At LA, I want everyone to see me.”
Published on Sep 28, 2025