When Mirabai Chanu squatted, the weight of an entire medal-hungry nation rested on her shoulders. However, that was not to be. As the 4’11” lifter tried to get back on her feet and outstretch her arms, they wobbled and gave away.
The barbell dropped and India settled for another fourth place with a total of 199 kg. Mirabai Chanu, one of the favourites for a podium finish, missed it by one kilo as lifters from China, Hou Zhihui (total 206), Valentina Cambei (205, Romania) and Surodchana Khambai (200, Thailand) won medals.
Mirabai Chanu stood on the platform in disbelief, breaking into tears.
This has been an Olympic cycle like none other for her: managing a broken body, healing an overworked mind, away for months on end from the family, worrying about them as Manipur, her home, burnt.
Never, during these most testing years, did Mirabai Chanu lose her infectious smile, the unending energy and the will to put her body to more torture. She did all that but it wasn’t enough.
Aware that they were way behind China’s Hou Zhihui, the gold medallist, Chanu attempted to execute the only plan she and her coach, Vijay Sharma, had been devising: to lift a personal best, nothing less, to guarantee a spot on the podium. But in a field full of top lifters, even Chanu’s best didn’t take her to the podium.
Though she will not return home with a medal, the effort she put in can’t be undermined or overlooked. The coaching staff had had bubble-wrapped the fragile weightlifter and somehow held together her body that was broken and torn at various joints and tissues; a result of ‘inhuman’ workload which Mirabai Chanu very nonchalantly dismisses as professional hazard.
It had been that kind of a build-up to the Olympics.
The one where she has spent as much time, if not more, in an orthopadic’s clinic and sitting across from a psychologist. On the outside, Chanu was lifting weights and defying gravity, which she so gracefully does. On the inside, she was tangled in a web of self-doubt. The kind of build-up where, at least until last year, she endured more injuries than the number of competitions she’s competed in.
The wrist, the shoulder, the back and the hip, combined with the thigh, troubled Mirabai so much that even her mind, which remains unwavering and strong when the 49kg dynamo lifts iron more than twice her weight, started playing games.
Confiding in her therapist, Mirabai Chanu would wonder ‘why is this happening?’ “Did I do anything wrong? Or is it something else?”
Mirabai Chanu competes during the women’s 49kg weightlifting event at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday. (AP Photo)
The hunt for a cure took Mirabai Chanu and Sharma far beyond the secure and familiar training environment in Patiala, which has been their home for a better part of the last decade, to a physio’s lab in the USA and a surgeon in Mumbai.
And just like that, her Tokyo-to-Paris cycle became a ‘project’ to ‘fix’ Mirabai Chanu. That’s how her approach to the Tokyo Games had been too. Back then, it was a ‘mysterious’ back injury. This time, as she found herself in another race against time to get fit, it was a lot more.
Sharma said her struggles were a result of lifting ‘one truckload’ of weight for close to a decade. That, he added, was a maximum training load; the total value of the number of sets, repetitions and weight. It was a slight peek at the behind the scenes grind of an athlete who got battered with decades of pumping iron.
The consequence of which was seen at the Asian Games last year, when she crumbled and fell down in the middle of her lift, with the bar dropping in front of her. Chanu was carried away by the coaching staff and when she returned to India, she was directly taken to meet a doctor who has fixed dozens of India’s athletes, Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala.
When she first met him, Mirabai Chanu complained of pain in the right side of her hip. By the time that was healed, her shoulder gave up — more specifically, a torn rotator cuff, a layer of muscles that allows the shoulder to stabilise so that the larger muscles can do their job.
So serious was the injury that Mirabai Chanu was asked to keep away from doing what she loves the most – lifting weights. She was asked to let the ‘traumatic tears’ heal before the training load could be gradually increased.
Those five months until the start of 2024 were among the ‘most stressful’, a period when she ‘kept sanity’ by befriending the stray dogs inside Patiala’s National Institute of Sport, feeding them, taking them for a walk and arranging veterinary visits. Her mother came over from Manipur, providing the comfort of home food.
Those months Sharma said made them wiser as he planned Chanu’s rehab in a way that when the day came, she could do exactly what they hoped for: a 200-plus lift.
They arrived at the magic number knowing that no other lifter except the Chinese, among those competing in Paris, had a total more than her. All she needed was a proper execution and touched the 200 kg mark.
But on a gloomy day, there was no silver lining.
