The final piece of the puzzle: Mirabai turns obsession into reality with Asian Games silver

India’s Mirabai Chanu secured silver in the women’s 49kg with a combined lift of 198kg. | Photo Credit: PTI

On Wednesday morning, Mirabai Chanu removed the ‘nearly’ in a career that had nearly everything.

Asian Games medal - won

At the Nagoya City Trade and Industry Center in central Nagoya, the 32-year-old took silver in the women’s 49kg weightlifting competition. Over the course of the previous hour, Mirabai had lifted 87kg in the snatch section and then 111kg in the clean and jerk for a total of 198kg.

Like Thanos gathering the Infinity Stones, Mirabai Chanu finally has the closing piece that will go up not on a gauntlet but on the wall in her home in the village of Nongpok Kakching, just outside Manipur’s capital, Imphal. Unlike the Marvel ultravillain, though, tiny Mirabai, standing just under five feet and weighing just under fifty kilos, is surely in the pantheon of Indian sporting super heroes.

Her place up there was firmly cemented with or without a medal at the continental Games. A silver at the Olympics, gold at the World Championships, gold at the Asian Championships, and multiple gold medals at the Commonwealth Games will do that for you.

It’s a career haul that would satisfy nearly everyone. Just how much could an Asian Games medal matter? What difference would it even make? Even purely in numbers, India had won — by last count— 238 Asian Games silvers (357 bronze). Just 10 Olympic silver medals of that same colour.

It mattered to Mirabai. And that’s all there is to it. She had one of the latter. None of the former.

𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭-𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐀𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐢 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐮! 👏🥈

The Indian weightlifter wins silver in the women's 49kg final in Nagoya, finishing second with a total lift of 198kg .

🏋️ Snatch: 87kg
🏋️ Clean & Jerk: 111kg
🏅 Total: 198kg

📸: PTI… pic.twitter.com/UoGs8Xv09r

— Sportstar (@sportstarweb) September 23, 2026

It’s mattered to her for close to a decade and a half now. Probably longer. “Ever since I started weightlifting I had wanted an Asian Games medal,” she had told Sportstar a few months ago.

Now 32, and in the sunset of her career, Mirabai had first taken a crack at this competition as a callow 20-year-old in Incheon in 2014. She wasn’t even India’s best weightlifter in her category then, having finished behind statemate Sanjita Chanu just a couple of months before at the Commonwealth Games.

She finished ahead of Sanjita for the first time in Incheon but was still only 9th in Asia. That was still at the start of her journey. Those who had been following her journey knew it. “She is a one-in-a-generation talent,” former World Championship medallist and coach N. Kunjarani Devi had said not long after that Asian Games.

Indeed in the years that followed, Mirabai, steadily made her way into legend. There had been disappointments along the way. But the highs were lofty too. Gold at the 2017 World Championships in Anaheim and of course the Olympic medal in 2021 in Tokyo. She was the first Indian weightlifter since Karnam Malleswari to win those medals.

But try as she might, it had seemed Malleswari’s Asian games silver in 1998 — would remain impossible to replicate.

It didn’t help that — at least in the lightest women’s Olympic weight category — the Asian Games are among the hardest in the world. They are as competitive as any world-level event. For the last two and a half decades, the world records in the women’s 48kg and subsequently 49kg classes have been held by athletes from Asia. Of the 30 Olympic medals that have ever been awarded in this division, 27 have been won by athletes from Asia.

After falling short in Incheon, she’d missed the 2018 Games with injury. And there had been heartbreak in Hangzhou in 2023 where she finished fourth. If you want to know just how much an Asian Games medal meant to Mirabai you needed to see her compete at Hangzhou.

ALSO READ | When Sunil Gavaskar broke his dinner rule for Mirabai Chanu

It meant enough for her to risk her Olympic ambitions. In the warm-up hall of the Asian Games in Hangzhou in 2023, Mirabai knew she had tweaked her hip. With just a year before the Paris Games, she had all reason to play it safe and walk away. Instead she gritted and had weight loaded on the bar – 117kg – the second most she’d ever attempted in a desperate effort to take bronze.

Instead, she collapsed under the load. She had to be carried off the stage. At New Delhi’s airport, she was rolled out in a wheelchair, ignored by a crowd that had gathered around India’s hugely successful shooting contingent that had returned on the same flight.

When Mirabai once again fell agonisingly short of a second medal at the Paris Games, you might have thought the pursuit of stepping on the podium once again in Los Angeles — almost surely the last major competition of her career — would be a priority. With the lightest women’s Olympic weight division moving from 49kg to 53kg, that would mean Mirabai would have to start bulking up to compete with heavier athletes.

For two years, though, Mira’s held off the move. Even as she lifts several tonnes of iron with each training session, she counts every grain of rice and every morsel of food she eats. Mirabai literally starves herself because the hunger for an Asian Games medal was that much stronger. “I will try my best because I have to win where I have never won a medal before. The Asian Games is very important for me,” she had told Sportstar a few months ago.

Her task at Nagoya was made easier by the fact that China didn’t send a representative. Thailand’s Suthasini Kaeosingkhon and Indonesia’s Wijayana Diana were both from countries with impressive weightlifting traditions but still very early in their career.

As competitions go, this isn’t anywhere near Mirabai’s peak. North Korea’s Ri Song Gum was in a competition all her own. She won her third Asian Games gold , and smashed her own world record with a total of 215 kg.

There was a far harder fight for the next two places on the podium. And in that contest, Mirabai did exactly what she needed to do.

A precocious Wijayana belied her age — she’s just 21 — and went ahead of Mirabai at the end of the snatch section, lifting 88kg to the Indian’s 87kg. But in the clean and jerk section of the competition, where lifters rest the bar on their collar bones before pushing it overhead, Mirabai’s strength made the difference. She made lifts of 107 kg and 111kg to the Indonesian’s best of 103 kg. Mirabai didn’t even need to make a final attempt, having lifted 198kg to the Indonesian’s 191kg.

It was textbook stuff. Five attempts, five clean lifts.

Over the course of an hour on that competition platform, she had — hoisted about 473kg in all — nearly half a tonne. That was light weight for Mirabai, though, compared to the 264 grams of silver that would soon be hanging off a ribbon around her neck — an obsession that finally turned to reality.

Published on Sep 23, 2026

Latest on Sportstar

1. Live Blog 2026-09-23T10:54:52+05:30

   Badminton LIVE updates from Asian Games 2026, September 23: Shi Yuqi wins Game 1 against Lakshya
2. The final piece of the puzzle: Mirabai turns obsession into reality with Asian Games silver

3. Live Blog 2026-09-23T08:13:23+05:30

   IND vs AUS, 3rd Y-ODI Live Score: Australia U-19 235/8; Manal Chauhan picks three wickets