Mirabai Chanu’s Hat-Trick Gold Puts Manipur Back in the Spotlight

Mirabai Chanu lifted a Commonwealth Games record 190 kilograms in Glasgow on Sunday to win her third straight gold medal, a hat-trick no Indian weightlifter has matched. The 31-year-old topped the women’s 48kg field with 85kg in the snatch and 105kg in the clean and jerk, both Games records. Hours earlier, fellow Manipuri lifter Rishikanta Singh Chanambam had claimed India’s first silver of these Games in the men’s 60kg.

Both medals trace back to Manipur, a small northeastern state that has spent more than three years under ethnic conflict, and whose biggest star once warned she would hand back her medals unless peace returned home.

Why Isn’t Australia Hosting These Commonwealth Games?

Glasgow is hosting the 23rd Commonwealth Games because the original host pulled out. The Australian state of Victoria won the rights in 2022 but scrapped its plan in 2023 after projected costs for a regional Games model blew out past estimates, leaving organizers to find a replacement host in a hurry.

Victoria’s then premier, Daniel Andrews, later faced criticism for declining to name who scoped the flawed bid, while consulting firm EY defended its own consulting role in the collapse. Glasgow, which had already hosted the Games once in 2014, agreed to step in. That is how a Manipuri weightlifter’s biggest night ended up unfolding on a Scottish stage.

Eighty-Five and a Hundred and Five, Both Games Records

Chanu walked into the mixed zone at the Scottish Event Campus on Sunday evening in high spirits, greeted by a scrum of Indian reporters and cameramen who knelt to fix their microphones.

“Mera Aashirwad,” she told them, meaning “my blessings,” before adding, “Please finish quickly as I have not eaten for the last few days!”

The gathering gave her a rousing reception once her lifts were confirmed. “I am very happy that I was able to get my third gold medal for India,” she said. She admitted the buildup had worn on her. Plenty was running through her mind about whether she could pull off the win this time, she said. “I am relieved,” she added.

The hardest part, in her telling, had nothing to do with the barbell. “This performance is very important for me because I have been controlling my body weight for a long time,” Chanu said. “It was very difficult for me to bring it down to 48kg.”

The Kilogram She Was Chasing Since Paris

Two years earlier, that same fight against the scale had gone the other way. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, Chanu finished fourth in the women’s 49kg category with a total of 199kg, 88kg in the snatch and 111kg in the clean and jerk. She missed the podium by a single kilogram, a heartbreak that came three years after she took silver at the Tokyo Olympics.

Glasgow’s 190kg total, in a lighter 48kg category, was not a direct rematch of that Paris podium. But for a lifter who had spent a year hearing about the kilogram she didn’t have, a Games record gold answered the question anyway. Chanu said her next target is already set. “From now on, I will focus on the Asian Games,” she said.

A Historic Silver for Manipur’s Men

Rishikanta Singh Chanambam had never won a senior Commonwealth Games medal before Sunday. At 28, born in Imphal West, Manipur, he lifted a Commonwealth record 121kg in the snatch, a mark later equalled by Malaysia’s Mohamad Aniq Kasdan, who went on to take gold on a stronger clean and jerk. Rishikanta’s own clean and jerk of 143kg gave him a total of 264kg and silver, the first Commonwealth Games medal ever won by a male weightlifter from Manipur.

“It’s a dream to win my first Commonwealth Games silver medal,” Rishikanta said. “My family will be very happy.”

The medal nearly didn’t happen. He felt a shooting pain in his knee during the break after the snatch series.

I knew it would be bad if I give up. I told my coach I will have to win a silver and went for the final clean and jerk round.

Rishikanta said, describing the decision in Glasgow’s mixed zone once his medal was confirmed.

Records Rishikanta Already Owned Before Glasgow

Sunday’s silver was not a breakthrough out of nowhere. Rishikanta had been quietly stacking Commonwealth-level results for a decade before the Scottish Event Campus crowd learned his name.

• 2016 – Won gold at the Junior Commonwealth Championships.
• 2019 – Took the Senior Commonwealth Championship title.
• 2025 – Won gold at the Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships in Ahmedabad with a national record total of 271kg.
• 2026 – Took silver at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow with 264kg, the first Games medal by a male weightlifter from Manipur.

That last line matters more than a footnote. Manipur has produced a run of India’s best women lifters for years. Sunday was the first time its men’s program had a Commonwealth Games medal to show for it too.

Gold Medals From a State Still Under Curfew

Both medalists come from a state that has had little to celebrate since May 3, 2023, when ethnic violence broke out between the Meitei and Kuki communities. The conflict is now well into its fourth year.

• More than three years of conflict between Meitei and Kuki communities in Manipur, dating to violence that broke out on May 3, 2023.
• 50,000-plus people remain internally displaced across relief camps in the state.
• February 4, 2026 is when President’s Rule was lifted and Yumnam Khemchand Singh was sworn in as chief minister.
• March 21, 2026 brought the first direct talks between the state government and Kuki-Zo representatives in three years.

Chanu has never treated the crisis as background noise. When the violence first erupted in 2023, she appealed directly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to restore peace, and joined other Manipuri athletes in a memorandum warning they would return their medals if normalcy did not follow. Progress has been slow and uneven since. Human Rights Watch documented clashes that resumed in the state last year, and researchers at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project have tracked political violence across Manipur since 2023. Fresh unrest in April 2026 brought curfews and internet shutdowns back to several districts, even as the new chief minister’s outreach to Kuki-Zo leaders continued.

None of that appeared in the mixed zone on Sunday. What appeared instead was a hat-trick, a Games record silver, and two lifters from the same small state carrying India’s medal count on a night an ocean away from home.