GUWAHATI: Saikhom Tombi Devi vividly remembers her then six-year-old daughter Mirabai Chanu insisting on carrying firewood from the nearby jungle to their paddy field in their village on the outskirts of Imphal. Those were the images that flashed in her mind as Mirabai clinched silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics on Saturday.
Since morning, friends and neighbours had started assembling at their house, waiting to see the Manipuri become only the second Indian women to medal in weightlifting at the Olympics. The youngest of six sibilings, Devi recalls how Mirabai has always been the strongest among all. “My children used to go to a nearby jungle to fetch firewood.
She would always insist on carrying home the heaviest bundle of firewood. She could lift things which boys, even older than her, could not,” Devi says.
Growing up, Mirabai didn’t even show interest in weightlifting. It was archery, football that dominated her childood days. In fact, she had even persuaded her parents to enroll in archery training at the Khuman Lampak stadium in Imphal. And it is where Mirabai was turned into a weightlifter.
“We took her there but someone suggested she be trained in weightlifting. We don’t know what made him say so. She was enrolled for a life in weightlifting and the journey began,” the mother says.
It started a journey which would see Mirabai travel around 18km everyday from home to the stadium, fetching a ride on bus or truck or what ever passed through their village. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she entered the Games as one of the medal prospects, Mirabai could only manage one legal lift in snatch and zero in clean and jerk.