Gold, Grit and Growth: Mirabai Chanu's Journey to Commonwealth Games 2026 Glory

When Saikhom Mirabai Chanu locked out her final clean and jerk in Glasgow on 26 July 2026, she didn't celebrate right away. She wiped her eyes instead, as the Indian national anthem played over a stadium that had just watched her become a three-time Commonwealth Games champion. 

At 31, one of the oldest lifters in the women's 48kg field, she'd also just delivered arguably the best total of her career, breaking Games records in the snatch, the clean and jerk, and the combined total in the same afternoon. Chanu, who studies Sports Psychology at Amity University Online, has spent close to two decades proving that a career can survive almost anything- injuries, heartbreak, a global pandemic, one especially cruel single kilogram, and still end up exactly where it was always headed.
 

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From Imphal to the World Stage

Chanu grew up in Nongpok Kakching, a village outside Imphal, the youngest of six children. Long before anyone had heard of her, her family noticed she could carry loads of firewood that her own older brother struggled to lift. She'd wanted to become an archer, but there was no archery session running the day she wandered past a weightlifting hall at a sports complex in Imphal, so she watched the lifters instead, and stayed.

Inspired by Manipur's legendary Kunjarani Devi, she began training seriously as a young teenager, travelling 44 km a day because there was no facility closer to home. She won her first gold medal at a local meet at age 11, and by 2013 she was named Best Lifter at the Junior Nationals in Guwahati.
 

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

Hitting Rock Bottom in Rio

Chanu's Commonwealth Games story began in Glasgow itself, back in 2014, when a 20-year-old debutant took silver in the 48 kg category- her first taste of the same city that would hand her the title of her career twelve years later. Two years after that debut came the low point: she arrived at the Rio Olympics having just broken a 12-year national record, and then failed to complete a single clean and jerk lift, finishing with no total at all. 

The disappointment was severe enough that she considered retiring. She didn't. In 2017 she won gold at the World Championships in Anaheim, and in 2018 she added a Commonwealth Games gold in Gold Coast, a result that earned her the Padma Shri. By 2019, competing at the World Championships in Pattaya, she'd rebuilt enough to breach the 200kg total mark for the first time in her career, even if a fourth-place finish there meant the podium still wasn't guaranteed.
 

Tokyo's Historic Silver

Chanu's biggest moment arrived at the Tokyo Olympics, where she won silver in the 49 kg category with a total of 202 kg, an Olympic-record 115 kg clean and jerk among it- only the second Indian weightlifter ever to win an Olympic medal, after Karnam Malleswari more than two decades earlier. She competed wearing gold earrings shaped like the Olympic rings, a gift her mother had sold her own jewellery to buy years earlier for luck, and the image became almost as well known as the medal itself. 

Chanu backed up Tokyo with a second consecutive Commonwealth Games gold at Birmingham in 2022, by which point she was training around a Sports Psychology program at Amity University Online alongside a competition calendar that rarely slowed down.
 

The Paris Heartbreak

Then came the setback that tested her hardest. A serious injury at the 2023 Asian Games and a disappointing fifth-place finish at that year's Asian Championships sent her to St. Louis, USA, for a month of rehabilitation with her long-time coach, Dr. Aaron Horschig. She recovered enough to qualify for Paris 2024, only to finish fourth in the 49kg final- missing bronze by a single kilogram, having completed just one clean and jerk lift out of three attempts. 

It was the kind of margin that lingers, and by her own account afterward, one missed early lift in the clean and jerk was what it came down to. Even through that stretch, her Amity University Online coursework kept running in the background, one of the few parts of her routine that didn't depend on how a competition went.

Also Read: What It Takes to Win a Commonwealth Medal: Rishikanta Singh's Journey
 

The Long Way Back to Gold

Chanu answered Paris the way she'd answered Rio eight years earlier- by rebuilding. Gold at the 2025 Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships in Ahmedabad, with new championship records across the board, marked her return to form and booked her place in Glasgow. A silver at the 2025 World Championships in Norway kept her sharp heading into 2026. 

In Glasgow, she lifted a Games-record 190 kg total- 85kg snatch, 105 kg clean and jerk- 22kg clear of the field, wearing tricolour-ribbon hair clips she'd made herself the night before as a tribute to India. Afterward, she credited her family's support through years of injuries and thanked coach Vijay Sharma, saying simply that hearing the national anthem was what brought the tears- the same emotion, she said, that comes automatically whenever it plays.
 

Conclusion

Chanu's career is really one long argument against giving up at the low point, whichever low point happens to be in front of you at the time- Rio, an Asian Games injury, or a single kilogram in Paris. It's fitting, then, that the subject she's chosen to study at Amity University Online is Sports Psychology: the discipline of staying composed and motivated through exactly the kind of setbacks that have defined her career as much as the medals have. 

Coursework on resilience and competitive mindset isn't theoretical for someone who's lived through a no-total Olympics and a one-kilogram miss and come back from both with a Games record. At 31 and still adding Games records to her name, Mirabai Chanu isn't done yet, and if her history is any guide, whatever comes next will be built the same way everything else was: gold following grit, and grit following growth.