Like many boys of his generation, Varun Sanyal spent his childhood watching World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The world of scripted smackdowns and oversized showmen was magnetic to a young mind growing up in Singapore. It was watching Indian wrestlers like Sushil Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt succeed at the 2012 Olympics sparked something deeper in Varun. “They looked like us. From India. Doing well in a global sport. That changed something for me,” he says.
He wanted in. But his father didn’t want him to go. Combat sports were out of the question. So Varun waited. Years later, in Singapore’s mandatory National Service, he was earning his own money. With a small but steady income, he made a decision: he paid for a full year of combat sports training upfront. “If I was going to take this leap, I wasn’t going to do it half-in, half-out.”
He learned quickly how serious the choice was. In his first week of training, his coach paired him with a woman half his size. “She flipped me over her head. Tossed me around like I weighed nothing. I’d never felt so helpless,” he laughs. But that, he says, is the beauty of the sport. It humbles you. “You show up thinking you’re strong, and you get dismantled. It either breaks you, or builds you.” Varun, it was the latter. He trained relentlessly, squeezing in sessions between the physically exhausting hours of military camp.
Soon, he began competing. He picked up medals in jiu-jitsu and wrestling tournaments and earned a reputation for being the guy who always showed up.
Later Varun moved to the UK for higher studies, but he also knew it was one of the hotspots where MMA was taking shape as a sport. He began training under Stuart Austin at Fight Zone London and realised he had to unlearn a lot. In 2022, he made his amateur MMA debut and won decisively. That same year, he picked up his first major domestic title in India—the West Zonal Championship. He won gold. The following year, he raised the bar even higher and clinched the precious metal in the national MMA Championship. He repeated the feat in May 2025 by bagging yet another gold.
But for Varun, the fight is bigger than the belt. It’s about representation. “For a long time, when Indian teams showed up at global MMA events, people saw us as warm-up guys. Now, we’re winning. And suddenly, it’s, ‘Oh, the Indians are here to win.’ That shift matters,” he says with quiet determination. Today, Varun trains between India, Singapore, and the UK. Now, each time he enters the cage, he sees it as a statement. “India is here. Not just to participate, but to take the fight to the world.”
