Hello, I'm Luke Jones. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. We bring people together

to share their experiences. And this time we hear from three athletes whose lives changed in

24 after becoming their country's first medalist at the world's biggest sporting stage.

In our final edition of the year, we wanted to go back to Paris 2024 and check in with

athletes who created a special piece of history. One of them, Palicia Govadan, got a

Paralympic medal in Taekwondo for Nepal, the first for her and her country. She also

became an inspiration for many others.

My success has more than just put me in a spotlight.

It has shifted, like people's mindset.

It's shown people, especially athletes and person with disabilities,

that anything is possible.

Polisha also tells us later that her greatest achievement is that young people come up to her and say they want to be like her.

We start at the Olympics, though, where this year five countries athletes won medals for the first time.

We'll hear from two of those, David De Pina, who is from Cape Verde, a group of islands off the west coast of Africa.

David spoke to us from Portugal, where he

trains, and he took home a bronze in boxing's flyweight category.

Fia LaFond joined us on the line from Washington. She represented Dominica, a small Caribbean

island in the triple jump. Her whopping hop-skip and a jump of just over 15 metres, that's

49 feet, gave the country not only

its first Olympic medal, but a gold one too. But as Thier explained, she wasn't an immediate

success. I started competing for Dominica when I was 16, went to my first Olympics in Rio,

finished dead last. Oh no. And yeah, you know, third time's a charm. I went to Tokyo first Olympics in Rio, finished dead last.

...