“Saikhom is worthy,” tweeted Chris Helmsworth, captioning a photograph of Saikhom Mirabai Chanu, the diminutive lifter from Manipur, holding up her 2022 Commonwealth Games (CWG) medal, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Australian actor’s most famous screen Avatar as the comic book hero Thor, whose hammer can only be lifted by those who are “worthy”.
Chanu’s Games record-breaking lifts, coupled with her infectious, joyous persona, has made her the darling of India’s campaign in Birmingham and a social media star in her own right, to continue the thread she started with her unprecedented Olympic silver in Tokyo less than a year back.
It’s not just her. India’s 15-member weightlifting contingent took the Games by storm, winning 10 medals, including three gold, to top the standings for the event, just like they did in the previous edition in 2018 in Gold Coast Australia (9 medals, 5 gold), accompanied by memorable scenes: Chanu doing a gymnastics split with a six-year-old English fan, young Jeremy Lalrinnunga (gold, men’s 67kg) dancing, singing and showing off his extensive tattoos, or the heavyweight Lovepreet Singh (bronze, men’s 109kg) doing a “thigh-five” in tribute to Sidhu Moosewala, the socially conscious Punjab rapper who was murdered earlier this year.
This is not India’s best performance in the sport at the CWG—that came in 2014 in Glasgow (14 medals, 3 gold) though they were pipped in the final standings by Nigeria (13 medals, but a superior haul of 6 gold). Yet it brings a sport that’s otherwise neglected back into the limelight. A sport that otherwise makes the news for the wrong reasons—it’s frequent failure to clear dope tests.
“It was a good performance, more or less along the lines of what I expected,” said Vijay Sharma, the soft-spoken former weightlifter who has been guiding India’s national programme for close to nine years now, speaking over the phone from Birmingham. “I thought we would win a couple more gold, which turned out to be silver, because of injuries to lifters like Sanket Sargar (men’s 55kg), but I am happy, because what you saw here are the future of Indian weightlifting—Chanu, Jeremy, Achinta (Sheuli, gold, men’s 73kg)—and also something that’s never happened before, a medal in super heavyweight (Gurpreet Singh, bronze, men’s 109kg)."
To understand why the performance at Birmingham means more than the equally impressive performances from Indian lifters at the 2014 and 2018 editions of the Games, it is necessary to put the wins in context. The CWG, compared to the other major multi-sport events like the Olympics or the Asian Games, does not feature some of the world’s best lifting nations (China, North Korea, Iran, Thailand). Indeed, apart from Chanu, who remains firmly among the top three lifters in the world in her weight class (49kg), none of the other medal winners for India at Birmingham would have finished on the podium if they lifted the same weight at the Tokyo Olympics. But the gap is certainly closing in the lower weight classes.
“Look at Jeremy or Achinta,” Sharma said, “this is the first major event for both, they are both just 19, and they are not far from the world standard.”
Jeremy notched a combined lift of 300kg for his gold in 67kg category, 32kg short of the Tokyo gold lift in the same weight class, in what is his debut competition at the senior level. In 2014, India’s best lifter in the weight class was 69kg short of the Tokyo mark.
Achinta’s combined lift was 313kg, a stiff but not insurmountable 51kg shy of the Olympic gold mark and 29kg off the bronze mark. Achinta too was making his senior debut. In 2014, that gap between India’s best and the Tokyo standard was 68kg.
Mirabai Chanu with coach Vijay Sharma. (Image via Twitter/Mirabai_Chanu)
“When I started (as chief national coach) in 2014, Mira (Chanu) used to snatch 76kg and clean & jerk (C&J) 90kg,” Sharma said. “Now her snatch is 88kg (national record) and her C&J is a world record 119kg. It takes time. I am looking at 4-5 years before we have three or four lifters at the Olympic level. So, not 2024 (Paris Olympics) but 2028 (Los Angeles). What I can say confidently is that I am lucky and privileged to have some very fine athletes, who are disciplined, dedicated and committed to work with.”
One of India’s original weightlifting heroes, Odisha’s Katulu Ravi Kumar, who set a then CWG record en route to gold at the 2010 Games in New Delhi and qualified for the 2012 Olympics, said that behind the scenes, there has been a massive change in India in terms of access to infrastructure and expertise for Indian weightlifters.
“When I won in 2010, we were very backwards,” Kumar said over the phone. “The infrastructure was falling apart, nothing was of international standard, there was no nutrition support, no sports science support, and we did not get to train or compete abroad for exposure, no matter how much we requested. It’s wonderful to see how things have changed now, how our young lifters are sent to the right places at the right time.”
Sharma agrees. Chanu spent most of 2020 working with a renowned coach and physiotherapist in the US to work on a back injury, postural issues, and muscle imbalances before her historic medal-winning performance in Tokyo.
“Or look at Sanket, he suffered an elbow injury during his competition here,” Sharma said. “We consulted a doctor well known for treating athletes here in England, he said it’s best to do a surgery as quickly as possible. We told the federation and the government, and Sanket immediately got clearance and funds to stay back and get the surgery done. This would not have happened a few years back.”
At the sprawling Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneshwar, where Kumar is both a practicing weightlifter trying to make a comeback after a failed dope test in 2019 as well as a coach, the infrastructure for weightlifting has gone from shambolic to state-of-the-art.
“This high-performance centre, with 12 practice platforms and one competition platform was built three years back as a collaboration between Anil Kumble’s company Tenvic and the Odisha government,” Kumar said. “You’ve got Abhinav Bindra’s ABTP (Abhinav Bindra Targeting Performance, an advanced training and injury management centre) coming up here. It’s amazing.”
At India’s Olympic training centre in Patiala, Punjab, a similar change began almost a decade ago, though it happened slowly.
“The lifting hall when I started was not great. The nutrition was absolutely terrible. There were no physiotherapists and people laughed if I said we need psychologists,” Sharma said. “Now we have a lifting centre that is as good as the best in the world, all our nutritional requirements are met, and the team has physiotherapists and psychologists.”
If there’s one thing that Sharma would like to see improving quickly, it’s access to better physiotherapists and more sports science.
Lovepreet Singh set a new national record in clean and jerk. (Image via @narendramodi/Twitter)
“Our physiotherapists are just not strong enough for the needs of weightlifters competing at the highest level,” he said. “And while we have a biomechanist now, we need a lot more expertise here to be at par with what’s happening around the world.”
The support of sports science, Kumar said, is critical for weightlifters.
“Postural alignment is everything,” Kumar said, “and you have to be a very good sports scientist to understand that at the level needed for elite weightlifters. It’s tied up with muscle imbalance, how to analyse that, whether the lifter can recruit certain muscles or not, and also, most importantly, to educate the lifters about what could potentially lead to a doping violence, something I’ve suffered from.”
Doping violations have long been a scourge in Indian weightlifting and a more robust awareness programme has gone a long way to fix that over the past few years.
India’s weightlifters scrabble to the top surmounting the toughest of obstacles. Chanu’s lifting career may not have even kicked off if it wasn’t for the kindness of truck drivers in her village in Manipur, who gave her free rides when she was a young girl so she could train in the government sports centre in Imphal, more than 25km from her village. Chanu acknowledged that by organising a feast for them in her house on her return from Tokyo, where she served them herself, tears streaming down her face.
Sargar, 21, worked at his father’s paan and tea shop in Maharashtra’s Sangli district, juggling that with college and training just a year back, before he was picked for the national camp in Patiala.
Achinta’s family suffered from extreme poverty—his father, a daily wage labourer, died of heatstroke when Achinta was 13, forcing him, his older brother and his mother to try and make ends meet through odd jobs—embroidery, farm labour, factory labour. “The question I grew up with was, will there be enough food for us today?” Achinta said.
His brother Alok gave up in his own ambitions of being a weightlifter to give Achinta a chance, before the young lifter from a village on the outskirts of Howrah, West Bengal, was scouted by the Army and sent to their Boy’s training institute sporting programme in Pune.
“You need a special kind of hunger in you to withstand the pain and physical stress of weightlifting at the highest level,” Sharma said. “These boys and girls deserve every bit of support they get and more.”
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