Pradeep Somasiri won the men’s 1500m T46 final at the 5th Asian Para Games in Aichi-Nagoya on Friday, finishing ahead of India and the Philippines to take what appears to be Sri Lanka’s first gold medal of the Games.
Somasiri showed strong form from the start of the race and pushed past a competitive Asian field to take first place, Hiru News reported at 7.19 a.m. Colombo time. India took silver and the Philippines bronze.
Sri Lanka’s fourth medal, and the colour that was missing
Three Sri Lankan medals had been reported at these Games before Friday, and none was gold.
Mohamed Safran took a bronze and Dhananjana Wickramasinghe a silver earlier in the week, and para-swimmer Galina Basnayake added a second silver on Wednesday in the Women’s 400m Freestyle S9 — the country’s first swimming medal of the Games.
That makes Somasiri’s run Sri Lanka’s fourth medal at Aichi-Nagoya and the first to change the colour of the country’s tally. Hiru does not itself describe the medal as a first; the sequence is drawn from this desk’s own tracking of the three medals reported so far.
A title he has held before
Somasiri is not a newcomer to this event. He won the men’s 1500m T46 gold at the previous Asian Para Games, and so arrives at Aichi-Nagoya as the defending champion in the distance.
That history is worth stating carefully rather than merging into the result. A search for Somasiri and the 1500m T46 returns his earlier victory in the same event at the same championship, which is exactly the kind of near-identical record that can be mistaken for current news. Friday’s race is a separate result, run at a different Games, and the two should not be conflated.
The T46 classification covers athletes with upper-limb impairment affecting one arm. Para athletics at these Games runs from 19 to 24 October, so Friday’s final falls near the end of the programme.
Not reported
Hiru’s filing gives no finishing time for Somasiri and names neither the Indian nor the Filipino medallist. It does not give the size of the field or the margin of victory, and it does not say whether any Asian or Games record was involved.
No other verified newsroom had filed on the race at the time of writing — the result is about two hours old and fell outside Colombo newsroom hours — so this account rests on a single source. The Daily Mirror has carried Sri Lanka’s earlier medals at these Games and would be the outlet to watch for a fuller report.
Sources: Pradeep Somasiri wins gold in the 1500m race at the 2026 Asian Para Games — Hiru News, October 23 (Sinhala).