A leap of 1.83m won Patna boy Sharad Kumar Yadav the high jump bronze at the Tokyo Paralympics on Tuesday.

But for the champion with a polio-affected left leg, a visit to his old school in Darjeeling, set 7,500 feet above the sea level, is still a mountain too high to climb.

Sharad, 30, is willing to visit any place on earth but not his alma mater until he has won gold in a Paralympic Games.

St Paul’s School must therefore wait at least three more years — till the Paris Paralympic Games — before it can hope to welcome back a former student whose career it has been following with pride for years and who has now earned national fame.

Sharad, back in Delhi from Japan where he participated in the T42 category high jump, told The Telegraph in a short WhatsApp message on Wednesday that a bronze was not good enough to warrant a visit to St Paul’s.

“Not good yet. (No) Gold yet,” he wrote.

It’s a position the high jumper had articulated as far back as 2016, months before the Rio Paralympics, when St Paul’s invited him as chief guest to its annual sports day.

Sharad, who had won the Asian Games gold in 2014 with a record jump, told one of his teachers, Arnold Mukhia, that he would visit St Paul’s only after bagging a Paralympics gold. When a podium finish eluded him at Rio, Sharad stuck to his word.

Sharad has not visited his old school, where he had enrolled in 2001 as a Class IV student and studied till Class X, since leaving after his boards in 2008.

Struck by polio in the left leg when he was just two years old, Sharad would clear heights at St Paul’s that his able-bodied peers could not. He set the school record in the high jump.

While most of the others would try the western roll (with the belly down) or scissors (upright jump) technique, Sharad perfected the Fosbury Flop (with the belly up), followed by all the top high jumpers in the world.

“We would never have encouraged the Fosbury Flop as it’s dangerous and there was no provision for mats. They had to land on mud and that could be risky,” Angelo Alva, a teacher at St Paul’s, had earlier told this newspaper.

Sharad played football, cricket, basketball and badminton too. “He was the school team goalkeeper and wicketkeeper, and represented the school in athletics,” Alva had said.

Before Sharad, St Paul’s had produced two Olympians — Paul Raschid, a boxer who participated in the 1948 London Games, and Peter Hildreth, who competed in the 110-metre hurdles in the 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympics.

From St Paul’s, Sharad went to Modern School in Delhi, graduated from Kirori Mal College and earned his postgraduate degree from JNU.

On Wednesday, he said he was willing to visit all these institutions but not St Paul’s without the ultimate prize.