In 2011, Arunima Sinha, a national-level volleyball player, was traveling by train when robbers attempted to snatch her gold chain and pushed her from the moving train when she resisted. She fell onto the adjacent track, and before she could move, another train ran over her leg. She lay injured on the tracks through the night before help arrived.
Doctors were forced to amputate her leg below the knee. While recovering in the hospital, rather than processing the assault and injury as an ending, she has said she began forming a specific, almost stubborn goal: to climb Mount Everest, a mountain she had never previously had any particular ambition to attempt.
She approached India's first female Everest summiteer, Bachendri Pal, for training and guidance, and spent roughly a year and a half in rigorous physical preparation on a prosthetic leg, an undertaking most mountaineering experts considered extraordinarily difficult even for climbers with no physical disability at all.
In May 2013, she reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the first female amputee in the world to do so. She went on to climb the highest peaks on several other continents as well, and has since worked to build sports infrastructure and support for other differently-abled athletes across India.