At five in the morning, hours before the Under-15 Asian Boxing Championships final began in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Mohammad Yasser was awake, thinking about the mistakes he had made in the semi-final. “I won, but knew I could have done better,” he says. By the end of the day, Yasser became the first athlete from Jammu & Kashmir to win the gold, beating opponents from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. When he was just six years old, Yasser’s house was demolished in 2018, in an anti-encroachment drive in Rajouri. Yasser remembers his anger then. Six months later, his father, a construction worker, died of a heart attack. “I grew up angry,” he recalls.
That fury was channeled by Mohammad Ishtiaq, his mentor, who saw Yasser fight with other boys over money at the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council Stadium. “He was full of anger, but I was impressed by the way he threw punches,” says Ishtiaq. “He had talent. He just needed direction.”
Yasser’s life changed when Ishtiaq decided to train him. “He would drag me out of my house and take me to practice,” Yasser smiles. “Sometimes all it takes for life to change is just one person refusing to give up on you.”
His mother, Naseem Akhter, a domestic worker, began to see boxing as a way to keep her son away from the dangers around them. “I had seen many young kids around us become drug addicts,” she says. “I felt boxing could give him a different path.” Yasser agrees. “I’ve seen people using drugs in my building,” he says. “I worried about my family’s safety all the time.”
Boxing, however, brought new challenges. Equipment was limited, and maintaining an athlete’s diet was a daily struggle. “We worked with whatever resources we had,” says Ishtiaq. “Yasser found maintaining a proper diet difficult because his family struggled to meet daily expenses.” Support also came from Ishtiaq’s friend, Asif Lone, who helped meet some of Yasser’s training expenses. “People say I did this by myself, but that’s not true,” Yasser says.
Despite school and doing a part-time job, Yasser’s routine is relentless. He trains in the morning and works as a cook for MBBS students in the evening, earning `2,500 a month for his training.
In Tashkent, as he stepped into the ring for the final game, thoughts of home remained in his mind. “I kept thinking about my family’s poverty and everything we had been through. I knew I had to win.” His victory has changed the way the teenager imagines his future. “Before this, a boy like me could not even imagine leaving Rajouri, forget travelling abroad,” he says. “Now I feel my dream of winning an Olympic medal had come true.”
The Asian Games and Youth Olympics are his next targets. Ultimately, he wants to become the first athlete from J&K to stand on an Olympic podium. For now, the champion is no longer fighting from the sidelines; he is stepping into the centre of the ring.