M Raja's Road to Commonwealth Silver Was Built One Lift at a Time

When Raja Muthupandi successfully lifted 160kg in the clean and jerk on 26 July 2026, he secured a silver medal in the men's 65kg weightlifting event at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, adding India's third weightlifting medal of the day. It also closed a loop that had been open for seven years. Raja, who studies Sports Psychology at Amity University Online, didn't arrive at that podium on raw talent alone, he arrived there after an injury that nearly ended his career, a pandemic that stalled his recovery, and a weight-class logjam that kept him off India's biggest stage once already, back in Birmingham. His silver wasn't won in Glasgow. It was built, lift by lift, over most of a decade.
 

Apply Now

A Career Nearly Derailed

Raja comes from Sathuvachari in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, a state with a smaller weightlifting pedigree than powerhouses like Manipur but one that's produced its own share of national-level lifters. His story could easily have stopped in 2019. A serious ligament tear in his elbow during that year's Commonwealth Championships threatened to end his career before it had properly started, and the recovery that followed was long even by the standards of a sport where joint injuries are common and rarely heal on schedule. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, delaying his rehabilitation further and taking away the training camps and competitions he needed to rebuild form and confidence. By the time he was fit again, the landscape of Indian weightlifting had shifted around him.
 

A New Weight Class, A New Chance

The specific problem was Jeremy Lalrinnunga. As the Olympic-medal-winning prodigy rose through the same higher weight category Raja competed in, the selection picture for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games left no room for him- a brutal outcome for an athlete who'd already lost years to injury. The turning point came when international federations restructured the weight categories and introduced the 65 kg class. 

Raja moved into it and started over, working under national coach Vijay Sharma, the same coach who had guided Lalrinnunga to Youth Olympic gold years earlier. It gave Raja a lane of his own again, and he took it- enrolling around this time in the Sports Psychology program at Amity University Online, a decision that gave him something to build steadily alongside a lifting career he was rebuilding from close to zero.
 

The Breakthrough Years

The rebuild paid off in 2025. At the Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships in Ahmedabad, Raja won silver with a personal-best total of 296 kg- 128kg in the snatch and 168 kg in the clean and jerk- his first international medal at the senior level after everything that had come before it. Months later, at the World Weightlifting Championships in Forde, Norway, he finished ninth in the men's 65kg category against a considerably deeper international field, and pushed his personal best further still, to 299 kg. He kept the momentum going into 2026, competing at the 20th Senior National Weightlifting Championships in Modinagar in February, all while working through his Sports Psychology coursework at Amity University Online between training blocks.
 

Glasgow: A Lift-by-Lift Battle

None of it came easily in Glasgow either. Raja missed his opening snatch attempt at 126 kg before clearing it on his second try, then failed at 129kg on his third- a solid but unspectacular start that left him behind Malaysia's Aznil Bin Bidin Muhamed, who had opened with 130kg and added 133 kg before a 135 kg miss. The clean and jerk followed the same up-and-down pattern: a failed opener at 158kg, a successful second attempt at 160kg that pushed his total to 286 kg and briefly put him in the lead, and a final, gold-chasing attempt at 165kg that didn't come off. 

Aznil went on to lift a Commonwealth Games-record 299 kg, completing a hat-trick of CWG titles after Gold Coast 2018 and Birmingham 2022- the very Birmingham Games that Raja himself had missed entirely. Papua New Guinea's Morea Baru took bronze. Raja's silver, still, was India's fourth medal of the Games and the country's third in weightlifting that day alone, alongside Mirabai Chanu's gold and Rishikanta Singh's silver.
 

A Medal for His Parents and His Coach

Raja didn't hide his disappointment afterward. "I am certainly disappointed because my coach had placed his trust in me," he told ANI, before dedicating the medal to his parents and to Vijay Sharma and promising to train harder under his coach's guidance in the buildup to his next competition. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated him on social media, and Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya called it another proud moment for Indian weightlifting. For an athlete who'd been written out of one Games entirely, a silver- even one that came with visible frustration at missing gold, was still a considerable comeback, and one he was careful to credit to the people who'd stood by him through the years he couldn't compete at all.
 

Built One Lift at a Time

What Raja's medal really represents isn't a single day in Glasgow; it's every session logged in the years his career could have quietly ended instead. An elbow that had to heal properly before it could take real weight again. A weight class that didn't exist yet when he needed it most. A coach willing to rebuild a lifter from close to nothing. And, running alongside all of it, a Sports Psychology program at Amity University Online that he kept working through rather than putting on hold- the kind of long-game patience that a comeback story like his actually requires, and not a bad subject to be studying for someone who's had to manage his own motivation through years without a single international result to show for it. He's already made clear he isn't finished chasing the gold that got away in Glasgow, and given how far he's come back from already, it would be unwise to bet against him getting there.