When Mirabai Chanu squatted, the load of a complete medal-hungry nation rested on her shoulders. Nevertheless, that was to not be. Because the 4’11” lifter tried to get again on her toes and outstretch her arms, they wobbled and gave away.
The barbell dropped and India settled for another fourth place with a complete of 199 kg. Mirabai Chanu, one of many favourites for a podium end, missed it by one kilo as lifters from China, Hou Zhihui (complete 206), Valentina Cambei (205, Romania) and Surodchana Khambai (200, Thailand) gained medals.
Mirabai Chanu stood on the platform in disbelief, breaking into tears.
This has been an Olympic cycle like none different for her: managing a damaged physique, therapeutic an overworked thoughts, away for months on finish from the household, worrying about them as Manipur, her house, burnt.
By no means, throughout these most testing years, did Mirabai Chanu lose her infectious smile, the never-ending power and the desire to place her physique to extra torture. She did all that but it surely wasn’t sufficient.
Conscious that they had been method behind China’s Hou Zhihui, the gold medallist, Chanu tried to execute the one plan she and her coach, Vijay Sharma, had been devising: to raise a private finest, nothing much less, to ensure a spot on the rostrum. However in a subject stuffed with high lifters, even Chanu’s finest didn’t take her to the rostrum.
Although she won’t return house with a medal, the hassle she put in can’t be undermined or ignored. The teaching employees had had bubble-wrapped the delicate weightlifter and one way or the other held collectively her physique that was damaged and torn at numerous joints and tissues; a results of ‘inhuman’ workload which Mirabai Chanu very nonchalantly dismisses as skilled hazard.
It had been that form of a build-up to the Olympics.
The one the place she has spent as a lot time, if no more, in an orthopadic’s clinic and sitting throughout from a psychologist. On the surface, Chanu was lifting weights and defying gravity, which she so gracefully does. On the within, she was tangled in an internet of self-doubt. The form of build-up the place, at the least till final 12 months, she endured extra accidents than the variety of competitions she’s competed in.
The wrist, the shoulder, the again and the hip, mixed with the thigh, troubled Mirabai a lot that even her thoughts, which stays unwavering and powerful when the 49kg dynamo lifts iron greater than twice her weight, began taking part in video games.
Confiding in her therapist, Mirabai Chanu would surprise ‘why is that this taking place?’ “Did I do something incorrect? Or is it one thing else?”
The hunt for a treatment took Mirabai Chanu and Sharma far past the safe and acquainted coaching setting in Patiala, which has been their house for a greater a part of the final decade, to a physio’s lab within the USA and a surgeon in Mumbai.
And similar to that, her Tokyo-to-Paris cycle grew to become a ‘mission’ to ‘repair’ Mirabai Chanu. That’s how her strategy to the Tokyo Video games had been too. Again then, it was a ‘mysterious’ again damage. This time, as she discovered herself in one other race in opposition to time to get match, it was much more.
Sharma mentioned her struggles had been a results of lifting ‘one truckload’ of weight for near a decade. That, he added, was a most coaching load; the full worth of the variety of units, repetitions and weight. It was a slight peek on the behind the scenes grind of an athlete who acquired battered with a long time of pumping iron.
The consequence of which was seen on the Asian Video games final 12 months, when she crumbled and fell down in the course of her raise, with the bar dropping in entrance of her. Chanu was carried away by the teaching employees and when she returned to India, she was straight taken to fulfill a health care provider who has mounted dozens of India’s athletes, Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala.
When she first met him, Mirabai Chanu complained of ache in the correct facet of her hip. By the point that was healed, her shoulder gave up — extra particularly, a torn rotator cuff, a layer of muscle groups that permits the shoulder to stabilise in order that the bigger muscle groups can do their job.
So critical was the damage that Mirabai Chanu was requested to stay away from doing what she loves probably the most – lifting weights. She was requested to let the ‘traumatic tears’ heal earlier than the coaching load could possibly be steadily elevated.
These 5 months till the beginning of 2024 had been among the many ‘most irritating’, a interval when she ‘stored sanity’ by befriending the stray canines inside Patiala’s Nationwide Institute of Sport, feeding them, taking them for a stroll and arranging veterinary visits. Her mom came visiting from Manipur, offering the consolation of house meals.
These months Sharma mentioned made them wiser as he deliberate Chanu’s rehab in a method that when the day got here, she might do precisely what they hoped for: a 200-plus raise.
They arrived on the magic quantity realizing that no different lifter besides the Chinese language, amongst these competing in Paris, had a complete greater than her. All she wanted was a correct execution and touched the 200 kg mark.
However on a dismal day, there was no silver lining.