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

On the evening of 26 July 2026, in a packed hall in Glasgow, Chanambam Rishikanta Singh stood on a Commonwealth Games podium with a silver medal around his neck. The scoreboard said 264kg, a personal best under the brightest lights of his career. What the scoreboard couldn't show was everything that total actually cost- years of training across three countries, a childhood spent between the gym and the fields, and a knee that gave him trouble at the exact moment he needed it most. Rishikanta, who studies Sports Psychology at Amity University Online, is a case study in what a Commonwealth medal genuinely takes to win.
 

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A Childhood Between the Gym and the Fields

The story starts a long way from Glasgow, in Ngairangbam Makha Maning Leikai, a village in Manipur's Imphal West district. Rishikanta's father, Chanambam Irabot Singh, drove a bus and truck for a living; his mother, Chandrajini Devi, worked as a daily-wage labourer in the fields. The family of six owned no farmland of their own, and money was tight enough that Rishikanta picked up agricultural and construction work himself between training sessions, just to have some pocket money. Boxing was his first love, not weightlifting- Manipur's own Dingko Singh, Mary Kom and Sarita Devi were the athletes he grew up idolising. 

When he tried out for a spot at the National Sports Academy in Khuman Lampak, however, the selectors placed him in weightlifting instead. His brother has since said Rishikanta pushed back and even asked to switch, but the academy's rules didn't allow it- so he stayed, and slowly the sport won him over. That same willingness to adapt to a path he hadn't chosen carried into adulthood, most recently into a Sports Psychology program at Amity University Online, built around rather than after his competitive career.
 

The Long Road Through India's Sporting Institutes

That academy, which offered free schooling alongside training from Class VI onward, became the first rung on a long institutional ladder. From Khuman Lampak, Rishikanta moved to the Army Sports Institute in Pune, then to the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports in Patiala- the traditional home of Indian weightlifting, and later to the National Sports Academy Vasil Levski in Bulgaria for more advanced coaching. Representing the Indian Army throughout, he currently trains out of Modinagar in Uttar Pradesh. It's the same pipeline that has produced Manipur's other great lifters, Kunjarani Devi and Sanjita Chanu among them; the small northeastern state has an outsized claim on India's weightlifting history, and Rishikanta's rise placed him alongside a fellow Manipuri and Amity Online classmate, Mirabai Chanu.
 

A Decade Building Toward Glasgow

The medal in Glasgow wasn't a sudden arrival; it was the payoff of a decade of steady, occasionally frustrating progress. Rishikanta finished third at the 2016 Junior Commonwealth Championships, then won gold at the senior Commonwealth Championship in 2019. A sixth-place finish at the 2022 Asian Championships kept him grounded about how much work remained. He competed at the Birmingham 2022 Games in the 55kg category without reaching the podium, and when international weight classes were restructured afterward, he made the move up to 60kg- a change that turned out to suit him well. 

At the 2024 National Weightlifting Championships, he set a national record with a 124kg snatch, and in 2025 he won gold at the Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships in Ahmedabad with a national-record total of 271kg, a result that booked his ticket to Glasgow. He fit his Amity University Online coursework around all of it, submitting assignments between qualifying meets rather than waiting until his lifting career winds down.
 

121kg, and a Knee That Wouldn't Cooperate

On the day itself, Rishikanta delivered exactly the kind of composed performance that his build-up promised. He opened his snatch series conservatively at 116kg, moved up to 119kg, and then called for 121kg on his final attempt- a lift that broke the existing Commonwealth Games snatch record and put him in the lead heading into the second discipline. Malaysia's Mohamad Aniq Kasdan would later match that same 121kg, setting up a straight fight between the two lifters in the clean and jerk. That's where the story turned. Rishikanta locked in 143kg cleanly, missed at 148kg, and then, chasing gold, called for 151kg on his last attempt, he got the bar to his shoulders but couldn't complete the jerk, a knee issue undercutting him at the worst possible moment. His total of 264kg was enough for silver behind Kasdan's Games-record 273kg, and it also happened to be India's first medal of the day and its first medal in an able-bodied event at these Games.
 

A Medal for Everyone Back Home

Speaking to reporters afterward, Rishikanta kept the moment bigger than himself. "This medal that I won today isn't mine; it belongs to everyone, to all of India," he said, dedicating it to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and thanking the Indian Weightlifting Federation and Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya for their backing. Congratulations followed from the Prime Minister's office and several senior ministers- recognition for a medal fifteen years in the making.
 

What a Medal Like This Actually Takes

That's really the point of a story like this one: a Commonwealth medal is never just a single day's lift. It's a village upbringing, an academy that took a chance on a boxer-turned-weightlifter, three different training bases across two continents, a change of weight category at the right moment, and the mental discipline to keep lifting for gold even after the body has already given most of what it has. It's not a coincidence that Rishikanta studies Sports Psychology at Amity University Online alongside teammates who've walked similar roads- the coursework speaks directly to the competitive mindset his sport demands, fitted around a schedule that rarely allows for a fixed classroom.
 

What Comes Next

Rishikanta has already said what comes next: a push for a medal at the 2026 Asian Games, and presumably several more record attempts along the way, knee permitting. Alongside that, he's continuing his Sports Psychology degree at Amity University Online- a reminder that for him, this was never a choice between sport and study, just two halves of the same long game. He's also said, more than once, that the medal he won in Glasgow doesn't feel entirely like his own, that it belongs to the federation, the coaches, the Army, and everyone back in Manipur who watched a boxing-mad kid get talked into weightlifting and never looked back. If Glasgow is any indication, the knee will heal, the training will continue, and the next total on the scoreboard will tell an even longer story than this one.