Mirabai Chanu's World Championship Silver Signals Resurgence on Global Stage

Mirabai Chanu walked up to the World Weightlifting Championships stage in Forde, Norway on Thursday for her last attempt at the clean and jerk. In front of her was a bar that weighed 115kg -- 2.4 times her own bodyweight. She looked down at it with pursed lips, looked back up, heaved her shoulders, bent down to wrap her fingers around the bar, let out a primal yell, and with a grunt placed it on her shoulders, the effort making her bounce twice. Six seconds she kept it there, holding, building up effort within that powerful frame. Another grunt, her left leg going back, her right bending, and she lifted the 115kg bar up over her head. By the time she straightened up fully, shivering with effort, a hint of a smile crept onto her face. As she dropped the bar, the smile became full-fledged followed by a 'namaste'... Mirabai Chanu, Worlds silver medalist again.

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Now, there are few things that light up Indian sport like a Mirabai Chanu smile, especially when it comes at the end of a successful lift. Maybe it's the incongruity of it all: a woman barely 5 ft tall, weighing just 48kg, lifting metal more than twice her bodyweight clean above her head just feels impossible, like something out of a comic writer's imagination. Maybe it's the odd timing given all that precedes it: the seriousness before the lift, the utter strain during it. Or maybe it's just the sheer happiness that seems to radiate from the great lifter.

It's a smile, though, that we hadn't seen for some time. The last time we'd properly seen it on a global stage was 2021, at the Tokyo Olympics when she won silver (the Commonwealth Games of 2022 don't really count: that was Mirabai vs Mirabai and just a whole lot of fun), and over the past couple of years she's been struggling. A fourth-place finish at the 2023 Asiad was followed by another distant fourth at the Paris Olympics.

You could say a fourth-place finish in major competition is not a bad one for an Indian athlete, but Mirabai has pushed the bar so high that it seems a failure. Consecutive fourth place finishes seemed to signal something... maybe this was it. 31 now, her body held together by sheer will more than anything else, it would have been understandable if she just up and left. In a sport that traumatises the body like few others, she's lasted a long time -- her first CWG medal was more than a decade ago -- but pushing it to 2025 seemed a major ask.

And yet... here we are. With China's imposing double Olympic champion Hou Zhihui missing in action, Mirabai and coach Vijay Sharma had seen a chance.

Mirabai Chanu wins SILVER�� at the 2025 Weightlifting World Championships with this 115kg (253lbs) clean & jerk! pic.twitter.com/BCnx1v9RUY

- Squat University (@SquatUniversity) October 2, 2025

In the snatch (where you lift the bar above your head in one smooth motion) which is traditionally Mirabai's weaker section, she lifted 84kg in her first attempt but failed at the next two (both 87kg). It was much less than what she had lifted in either the Tokyo or the Paris Olympics, but here it was enough to enter clean and jerk (lift, place on shoulders, lift again) in third position.

This stronger lift of hers had proved the toughest test for her during the Paris and Hangzhou 'failures'. At the Olympics, she'd lifted 111kg, at the Asiad, 108kg. Neither would have displaced Thanyathon Sukcharoen from silver and would have put her in real danger of being hunted down by the chasing pack. Under such immense pressure, she lifted 109kg, 112kg and then 115kg to take her total to 199kg... and win silver by a kilo.

Ahead of her, North Korea's Ri Song-gum was in a league of her own, lifting 91kg in snatch and 122kg in C&J to break the world record with a total of 213kg. But Ri was never her target, realistically. As she lifted that 115kg bar above her and smile, the commentator on the Olympic channel accidently said it: "And Mirabai has done it. India once again back on the podium at a World Championships."

Mirabai had wanted a medal, her third at the World Championships, to prove that she (and India) still belonged on the biggest stages. On Thursday night, that's exactly what she got.