Mirabai Chanu was a star the moment she won India a silver medal on the opening day of the Tokyo Olympics. With every day since, the evidence of just how wonderful she is, as an athlete and a person, has been piling up. One of the first things Chanu did after returning from Tokyo was acknowledge the help that truck drivers from her village in Manipur gave her when she first started out as a weightlifter, giving her free rides to her training centre more than 25 km from her home. She organised a massive feast for them, serving the food herself, tears streaming down her face, the drivers crying too.
At the Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Birmingham this week, she did it again, spending hours immediately after her win obliging every fan with a warm smile, a quirky pose and a selfie. A six-year-old English girl came over for an autograph and told Chanu she had just started gymnastics, and then did a split. To the girl’s delight, Chanu did a split too.
There’s something joyous about Chanu; it’s visible in the way she walks, talks, smiles. She’s not alone in this. Many of India’s newest crop of sporting heroes seem self-assured, warm, helpful, fun. There was the way Neeraj Chopra stood up for his friend Arshad Nadeem when the Pakistani javelin thrower was being trolled. There’s Mizoram weightlifter Jeremy Lalrinnunga, the tattooed, singing, dancing, ever-smiling gold-medallist at Birmingham, one of our best prospects at a weightlifting medal, alongside Chanu, at Paris 2024.
Our entire crop of weightlifters at CWG has me hooked. And not just because watching people lift superhuman weights with precision is a thrill. Or because the torrid competition is an affair as tense as a fine tennis duel (can she really do it; can he really lift that?). But because of the incredible tales of triumph that are their life stories.
Chanu worked on her family’s farm and hitched rides on trucks to get to training. Maharashtra’s Sanket Sargar, who won silver at CWG, worked at his father’s tea stall by day, training in the evenings. West Bengal’s Achinta Sheuli, who won gold, saw his family go from poor to nearly destitute when his father, a daily wage labourer, died of heatstroke. Sheuli, his mother and elder brother took on any jobs that came their way: embroidery, farm labour, loading-dock work, living hand-to-mouth. His brother Alok Sheuli, a weightlifting enthusiast, introduced him to the sport and then gave it up to work longer hours, so his brother wouldn’t have to, and could train instead.
“We could not afford eggs or meat, so we would go to neighbouring houses and ask them to give us the starchy water that you throw out after making rice. Because that’s high-energy food,” Achinta told me, some years ago.
“There’s a lot more good things coming my way, I can feel it,” he told reporters, after winning the CWG gold.
Here’s to him, and all the rest.
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