Mirabai Chanu: Swagger, silver, the hint of a smile

The 26-year-old has been setting records and building up to this win ever since her collapse at Rio. What a comeback

Two kg. That’s the weight that was on Mirabai Chanu’s mind on Thursday, 48 hours before she was to take the field on Day 1 of the Tokyo Olympics, attempting to win India’s first weightlifting medal since Karnam Malleswari in 2000.

That’s how much she had to lose to weigh in at 49 kg, her category. On Thursday, she did some light cardio, skipped lunch, ate just enough to keep her energy levels stable and dropped a kilo. On Friday, she repeated the process and ended the day with a video call to her family in Imphal, Manipur.

If she was nervous at all about her upcoming event, she didn’t show it. But she had every reason to be.

In 2016, at her debut Olympics in Rio, Chanu, then 22, was already being talked about as a medal contender. Olympic weightlifting has two categories, the snatch and the clean-and-jerk.

Each athlete gets three attempts at each lift. Medals are given based on the combined total of the two best lifts from each category. Chanu was not very confident of her snatch, but in clean and jerk, she was one of the world’s best. Except at the Rio weightlifting finals, after a reasonably good lift in the snatch, Chanu inexplicably failed at all three of her clean and jerk attempts.

“I broke down,” Chanu later told reporters. “I was unable to understand why I failed.”

No matter. Chanu returned to her meticulous training regime. She began to see a psychologist. When she developed a problem with her back, as most lifters do, she contacted one of the foremost experts in the field, a doctor in the US who was a former weightlifter. She spent a few months in the US, getting battle-ready. And she worked and worked, step by step, muscle by muscle, on making her clean and jerk fail-proof.

104 kg. That may have been the weight on Chanu’s mind all these years. It’s what she could not lift in Rio. It’s a number that she left behind as she won a world title in 2017, bettered her personal best and the national record twice in the last two years, and set a world record (119 kg) in the clean and jerk.

202 kg. That’s the weight that must be on Chanu’s mind right now. It’s the combined total that got her a silver in Tokyo on Saturday, the first time India has won a medal on the first day of an Olympics and the first silver for Indian weightlifting at the Olympics.

She made it look so easy. She walked out with a swagger and the hint of a smile. She blasted through her series of lifts like she was in training.

Hidden beneath the poise is some marvellous technique and astounding grit. Anyone who has ever struggled to lift a heavy weight knows just what it feels like as the load strains the muscles, that feeling of breathlessness and helplessness as the body realises it’s not equipped to handle this.

Imagine the snatch then (do not try it at home): This heavily loaded bar that’s almost too hard to get off the floor. A pull with every muscle strained, core braised, glutes squeezed, heels dug into the ground, shoulders squeezed at the back, just to release it from the ground and straighten yourself holding it. That’s just step one.

Now comes the hard part. A mighty heave with muscles firing in an order that you’ve trained them for over years and years, to lift that weight straight above your head and stand there for a few seconds, to show that you have it under control.

Imagine doing that with 25 kg. Now, imagine adding weight steadily till you hit 87 kg, which is what Chanu lifted in the snatch in Tokyo. Imagine doing something similar: getting a weight off the ground and over your head and holding it there, but with a different technique and with 115 kg this time. That’s how much Chanu lifted in the clean and jerk.

On Sunday, her body will be sore all over, but her mind will be free of all weight.