The Girl Who Carried Firewood

On the green hills outside Imphal, a brother and sister had gone out to gather firewood. The boy tied up a big bundle of branches and tried to lift it. It was too heavy. His little sister, who was about twelve, bent down, picked it up, balanced it, and carried it all the way home.

Her family laughed in surprise. Nobody knew it yet, but they had just seen the beginning of an Olympic story.

The youngest of six

Saikhom Mirabai Chanu was born in 1994 in Nongpok Kakching, a village near Imphal, in the state of Manipur, in north-east India. She was the youngest of six children. The family lived simply, and like many children in the village, Mirabai helped with the household work, which included fetching water and collecting wood from the hills.

At first, she dreamed of becoming an archer. Then she learned about Kunjarani Devi, a weightlifter from Manipur who had won many international medals for India. Mirabai decided that she, too, would lift.

The long ride to training

The nearest proper training centre was a sports complex in Imphal, a long way from her village. There was no money for regular bus fares. So, for years, Mirabai would stand by the road early in the morning and ask the drivers of trucks carrying sand and stone to the city to give her a lift.

The drivers came to know the small, determined girl who waited for them every day. They took her to training, and many of them brought her back again.

At the training centre, she first practised her technique with a bamboo pole, because she was not yet ready for a real metal bar. Weightlifters need a lot of good food, especially milk and meat, and that was hard for her family to afford. Her parents and brothers and sisters made sacrifices so that she could keep going.

Rio, 2016

Mirabai rose quickly through the national ranks. In 2016, she was chosen to represent India at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, in the women's 48 kg category.

A weightlifting competition has two parts: the snatch, where the bar goes overhead in one movement, and the clean and jerk, where it is lifted first to the shoulders and then overhead. A lifter must succeed in both to get a final score.

In Rio, Mirabai completed her snatch. But in the clean and jerk, she failed all three attempts. Her name appeared on the results without a score.

She was heartbroken. She later spoke openly about how low she felt after Rio, and how she thought about giving up weightlifting altogether. Her family and her coach, Vijay Sharma, stayed close to her and helped her find her way back to the gym.

Getting up again

The next year, in 2017, Mirabai went to the World Weightlifting Championships in the United States, and won gold in the 48 kg category. She was the first Indian woman to win a world title in weightlifting in more than twenty years.

In 2018 she won gold at the Commonwealth Games in Australia. That year she received the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting award, and the Padma Shri. Then a serious back injury kept her out for months, and once again she had to rebuild her strength slowly.

Tokyo, 2021

The Tokyo Olympics had been delayed by a year because of the pandemic. On 24 July 2021, the first day of medal events, Mirabai Chanu walked out to lift in the 49 kg category.

In her ears she wore a pair of small gold earrings shaped like the Olympic rings. It was widely reported that her mother had sold some of her own jewellery to have them made, years earlier, so that they would bring her daughter luck.

This time, every lift felt steady. She lifted well in the snatch and then, in the clean and jerk, she raised the bar above her head and held it there, smiling. When the competition ended, she had won the silver medal.

It was India's first medal of the Tokyo Games, won on the very first day. Across the country, people celebrated. In her village in Manipur, her family and neighbours gathered in front of a television, and when she won, the house filled with joy.

When Mirabai came home, she did something that touched many people. She invited the truck drivers and helpers who had once given her lifts to training, and gave them a meal and gifts to say thank you. She had not forgotten a single kindness.

The girl who carried firewood home from the hills had carried something much heavier: the hopes of her family, her state and her country. And when she fell in Rio, she had found the strength to lift herself up again.

Want to read more?

Mirabai Chanu's Olympic results are listed on Olympics.com, the official site of the International Olympic Committee, and in the records of the International Weightlifting Federation.