Long before Saikhom Mirabai Chanu became one of India’s greatest weightlifters, she was a young girl from Nongpok Kakching, a small village in Manipur, helping her family make ends meet.
Her father worked as a construction labourer, while her mother ran a small tea shop. As a child, Mirabai would often walk into the forest with her siblings to collect firewood. It was there that her extraordinary strength first became noticeable. At around 12, she reportedly lifted a bundle of heavy logs that even her elder brother struggled to carry. She initially dreamed of becoming an archer. But after watching weightlifters train in Imphal, something changed. She wanted to lift.
The problem was getting there. The training centre was around 30 kilometres from home, and her family couldn’t afford daily transport. Her mother’s tea shop became an unexpected bridge to her dream. Sand trucks stopping there would give Mirabai free rides towards Imphal. For her first months of training, she even practised with makeshift bamboo barbells.
The girl who once travelled in sand trucks eventually travelled to the biggest stages in the world.
But her journey wasn’t without heartbreak. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Mirabai failed to register a valid clean and jerk in all three attempts. The disappointment was crushing. Criticism followed, and she even considered walking away from weightlifting.
Instead, she came back stronger. In 2017, she became a World Champion. At the Tokyo Olympics, she won silver and gave India its first medal of the Games. And in Glasgow in 2026, she returned to the Commonwealth stage where her international journey had once begun, winning gold in the women’s 48kg category and completing a remarkable third consecutive Commonwealth Games gold medal.
Yet perhaps the most beautiful part of Mirabai’s story came away from the podium. After Tokyo, she went looking for the truck drivers who had once helped a young girl reach her training sessions. She found many of them, thanked them and honoured them personally.
From firewood to bamboo bars, from borrowed rides to Olympic silver, and from heartbreak to another Commonwealth gold, Mirabai Chanu’s journey is a reminder that champions are not always born with opportunities. Sometimes, they simply refuse to stop lifting.
