After Years of Near-Misses, Sakshi Chaudhary Has Her Commonwealth Medal

On Wednesday, 29 July 2026, Sakshi Chaudhary beat Northern Ireland's Caitlin Fryers 5-0 across all three rounds of a women's 51kg quarterfinal in Glasgow, and with that unanimous decision, a medal became mathematically guaranteed- boxing has no bronze-medal bout, so a semifinal spot means a podium finish either way. It capped a run through the draw that had looked assured from the outside but had cost her a career's worth of patience to get to.

Sakshi, who is pursuing her MBA at Amity University Online, will now face Canada's Amber-Jane Wall on Friday for a place in the gold medal bout. Whatever colour the medal ends up being, this one had been a long time coming.

A Decade of Almost

Sakshi's amateur career reads like that of a champion long before Glasgow. She won a state-level silver as a young sub-junior in 2012, then gold at back-to-back Haryana state junior championships in 2013 and 2014, followed by gold at the 2015 AIBA World Junior Women's Championships and another at the 2017 World Youth Championship- a two-time Youth World Champion by her early twenties, and one of Indian boxing's most closely watched prospects. She even made an Olympic qualifier squad at one point, beating a seasoned opponent 9-1 in the trials to earn her spot.

Yet the senior level kept finding new ways to deny her a defining result. As she's described it herself, there was always something: a narrow points defeat, an untimely injury, a missed selection, or a rival peaking at exactly the wrong moment for her. For close to five years she competed in the 54kg category, only to find Preeti Pawar entrenched as India's undisputed No. 1 there, leaving Sakshi with no realistic path to a major Games squad in her established weight class.

Three Weeks to Remake a Career

The breakthrough, when it finally came, was audacious. Ahead of the national selection trials in Patiala this past May, Sakshi made the decision to drop three kilograms and move down to 51kg- a shift she made in roughly three weeks, through a strict diet that at times cut her carbohydrate intake to almost nothing. 

It worked. In the semifinal of the trials she faced two-time world champion Nikhat Zareen and beat her on a 4-1 split decision, using her reach to keep the fight at a distance where Zareen couldn't do her usual damage. Less than 24 hours later, in the final, she blanked reigning world and Asian champion Minakshi Hooda 5-0. Those two results, on consecutive days, booked Sakshi's place in India's squads for both the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games in one stroke.

She's also credited a less visible shift for the win: after winning gold at the 2025 World Boxing Cup in Astana, she started working with a sports psychologist, adding meditation, breathing work and visualisation to a training routine that had, until then, been almost entirely physical- around the same period she was also settling into her MBA coursework at Amity University Online, one more structured routine layered onto an already demanding schedule.

Glasgow: Win After Win

Glasgow has so far gone the same way the trials did. In the round of 16, Sakshi beat Botswana's Lethabo Modukanele 5-0, using her height and reach to control the distance from the opening bell. In the quarterfinal against Fryers- a European Championships silver medallist known for an aggressive style, and by most accounts the tougher assignment on paper- she repeated the trick almost exactly, winning all three rounds by identical 5-0 scorecards despite a late point deduction for a minor infringement that barely disturbed her rhythm.

It's the kind of composed, repeatable performance that doesn't happen by accident, and it's added Sakshi's name to a strong run of Indian boxing results at these Games alongside Lovlina Borgohain, Priya Ghanghas, Preeti Pawar and Jadumani Singh. After her round of 16 win, Sakshi put it simply: "Representing India at the Commonwealth has been my dream." She's also a Havildar in the Indian Army, one more thread in a career built almost entirely on discipline absorbed from two demanding institutions at once- the boxing ring and the armed forces.

What's Next

Sakshi's semifinal against Amber-Jane Wall on Friday decides only how good this story gets, not whether it has a happy ending- bronze is already hers. A win sends her into the final with a guaranteed silver and a shot at gold; a loss still leaves her on the podium in her first Commonwealth Games, in a weight category she only committed to three months ago. 

Either way, alongside a boxing schedule that would exhaust most people, she's kept working through her MBA coursework at Amity University Online, treating the degree as one more discipline to be maintained rather than a plan for some distant post-boxing future- proof, in its own quiet way, that the same person who rebuilt an entire boxing career in three weeks doesn't do anything by halves.

Conclusion

What makes Sakshi Chaudhary's story land isn't just the medal, it's how ordinary the years before it were, in the specific way that near-misses are ordinary for a lot of very good athletes who never quite break through. A blocked weight category, a string of results that almost went her way, a career that could easily have quietly plateaued at "promising junior talent" and stopped there.
 

Instead, she gambled on cutting three kilograms in three weeks, beat two world champions in back-to-back bouts to prove the gamble was sound, and then did it again twice more in Glasgow to turn a confirmed medal into a fact. Whether Friday adds silver or gold to that story, the bronze that's already hers took a decade to earn, and the MBA she's building at Amity University Online alongside it has been assembled the same patient way, one assignment at a time, fitted around a schedule that most people would find impossible to sustain for even a single season, let alone thirteen years.