When Mirabai Chanu first walked into a gym in Manipur to try weightlifting, a coach looked her up and down and made a casual remark that would stay with her for over a decade: ‘You could win a medal at the Asian Games.’
She surpassed that remark in nearly every way but the one it named.
Chanu, who can lift three times her bodyweight, won medals at the World Championships, the Commonwealth Games and, in 2021, a historic silver at the Tokyo Olympics. That consistency, chiselled over years of work and protected through countless injuries, had one gap: the Asian Games.
“Something always kept happening during or around the Asian Games. It reached a point where I would constantly wonder why this was happening,” says Chanu. Her longtime coach Vijay Sharma, sitting next to her, chimes in: “I won’t call it a psychological barrier. You can say that it happened by chance. We have discussed this many times. We realised if we attributed it to bad luck, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”
So they did something about it.
It started with how they approached the Commonwealth Games. Training loads were kept with Chanu’s past injuries in mind, and the duo chose not to chase a Commonwealth Games record. A gold with minimal effort was the call. It left her fresh to push at the Asian Games, for the one medal that would complete her.
Weightlifting asks for unflinching trust between coach and athlete. Even at these Asian Games, Chanu did not know what weights she was supposed to lift, or where she stood on the medal table. It was Vijay’s split-second permutations and combinations that ensured a silver arrived while keeping her limits in mind.
Vijay was there in Sydney in 2000 when Karnam Malleswari won a bronze medal. Malleswari’s gripe since has been that if her Russian coach had trusted her, a better medal could have been India’s. “When you’re in the arena, you need to make decisions in a fraction of a second. Whatever decisions we take are for the best of the players,” says Vijay.
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He did not allow that breakdown of trust, which he saw with India’s first Olympic weightlifting medal, when he started training Chanu. “That trust is essential. In life, whether with a life partner, in business, or in coaching, without trust, there is no bonding, and without bonding, there are no results. The trust that she has in me, even after she has won medals at the World and Olympic level, she still asks me what sets to pick up,” says Vijay.
“I didn’t even know that I didn’t need a third lift in Japan,” admitted Chanu. “Sir told me that the silver medal was assured and that we wouldn’t need to risk another lift.”
Once the medal was assured, Chanu could finally feel the weight lift off. It was a collective sense of wrong, felt by both her and Vijay, that was corrected in Nagoya. The fourth-place finish at the Paris Olympics had rankled deeply for both of them, more than two years on, until Nagoya came along.
“Winning this medal after so many years, across four Asian Games cycles, feels like a dream come true for both me and Vijay sir. It helps cover up the pain of missing out on the medal in Paris. Every time we looked at photos or videos from Paris, it reminded us of what we missed. This medal brings us peace and closure,” said Chanu.
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Their next challenge is the LA Olympics, and a jump to the 53 kg category. Chanu admits that a higher weight class feels more comfortable. “Now with the weight increase, it’ll give some relief from injuries, so we can focus even more on performance and everything else. Whenever I win a medal, I immediately look ahead to the next competition: what I need to do, what changes to make. I learn from every medal and championship, and that’s where I get my motivation,” says Chanu.
