Every morning, before the sun was fully up over Nongpok Kakching, a small village 30 kilometers from Imphal, a girl waited by her mother’s tea stall for a truck to stop.
The trucks carried river sand from Etham Moirangpurel to the capital. Her brother, Sanatomba, would scan the market square each morning to see which ones were headed toward Imphal, then send her off.
The drivers never charged her a rupee. They knew where she was going: the Khuman Lampak Sports Complex, where she trained to lift weights far heavier than a 12-year-old girl should have been able to move.
Her parents could spare only ₹10 to ₹20 a day. That would not have covered the daily commute. So a village tea stall and a fleet of sand trucks became, without anyone planning it, the first sponsorship deal of Saikhom Mirabai Chanu‘s career.
There was no logo on those trucks. No contract. Just neighbours deciding that a girl who could carry firewood bundles too heavy for her own brother deserved a ride.
The feast that repaid a debt no bank could measure
Years later, after Chanu returned from Tokyo with an Olympic silver medal around her neck, she did something unusual for an athlete of her stature. She went looking for the truck drivers.
She found about 150 of them. She hosted a traditional Manipuri feast, touched their feet as custom demands, and gave each man a shirt and a lengyan, the traditional scarf of her state.
It was not a marketing moment. But it captured, better than any statistic could, how Indian sport actually works at the ground level. When the state has no transport network for a poor family’s Olympic dream, it is often ordinary people, tea stall regulars and truck drivers, who quietly fund it.
That is the real starting balance sheet of Mirabai Chanu’s career. Everything that came after, the crores in prize money, the Adidas campaigns, the Amway contracts, sits on top of that foundation.
The mentor who came up with nothing
Before there was a coach, a federation stipend, or a truck driver’s free ride, there was a porch in Imphal.
In the mid-1980s, two teenage girls showed up every evening at the home coach Kunja Kishore Singh and lifted iron that wasn’t really iron: rods pulled off broken autorickshaws and welded onto heavy plates, a squat rack cut from bamboo.
One of those girls was Nameirakpam Kunjarani Devi, four feet ten inches tall, who would go on to win seven World Championship silvers between 1989 and 1997, mostly finishing behind lifters from China’s far better funded program.
She paid her own way for years by joining the Central Reserve Police Force, eventually rising to Commandant, because in that era a government salary, not sponsorship, was the only safety net an athlete had.
She trained into her forties, taking a Commonwealth Games record in Melbourne in 2006 at age 38, and kept competing even after a 2001 doping controversy and a later ban that swept up her entire police weightlifting team for offences she had nothing to do with.
Chanu’s own introduction to the sport ran straight through Kunjarani, though neither of them knew it at the time. As a twelve-year-old at a Manipur sports academy, hoping to take up archery, Chanu found the archery room shut for the day. The weightlifting hall next door happened to be screening a documentary about Kunjarani. She watched it, walked in, and never left.
The two met properly in 2011, at a national training camp in Bangalore. Chanu was intimidated at first. Kunjarani’s training was known to be brutal. But the relationship grew close enough that by 2013, at a camp in Patiala, Chanu was cooking Manipuri meals for her mentor and confiding in her the way she might confide in her own mother.
Kunjarani coached her to a silver medal at Glasgow in 2014, calling out instructions in Meiteilon from the corner of the platform, the same city where Chanu would return twelve years later to complete her hat-trick of golds.
By 2016, at the Asian Championships in Tashkent, Chanu had matched Kunjarani’s long-standing national total of 190 kg, the same figure, by coincidence, that she would lift to win Glasgow 2026 gold.
From ₹20 lakh to ₹1 crore, in the time it takes to win a medal
Indian sport has one old, stubborn rule: sponsors chase cricket, and everything else waits in line. Before Tokyo 2020, Chanu’s endorsement income sat between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 30 lakh a year. Respectable for a weightlifter. Invisible next to cricket money.
Then she lifted a total of 202 kg in the women’s 49 kg category and stood on an Olympic podium. Within months, her annual endorsement fee jumped to ₹1 crore, a five-fold increase. Gold at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games pushed her fees up another 25 to 30 percent.
This is the part of Indian sports business that rarely gets explained properly. A medal does not just bring prize money. It resets an athlete’s entire market value overnight, the way a hit product can reset a company’s stock price. Brands were not paying for what Chanu had done. They were paying to be associated with what she had proven she could do again.
Domino’s Pizza moved first, and lightly, offering her free pizza for life after she joked about craving one post-competition. That is what marketers call a moment campaign: cheap, quick, low commitment. It tests the water.
The real money came after, in multi-year deals that treated her not as a viral moment but as a long-term face. Adidas signed her for its “Stay in Play” period-proof sportswear campaign.
Amway India made her the face of its Nutrilite range, a product line that alone contributes over 61 percent of the company’s business in the country. Star Cement, a company that sells physical strength as a construction material, aligned itself with a woman famous for physical strength of a different kind, across the Northeast, West Bengal and Bihar.
Tasva signed her for its clothing line. Mobil put her name next to engine oil. Amrutanjan tied her to pain relief, an ironic but honest fit for an athlete who has spent a decade fighting her own body.
She is now managed by IOS Sports & Entertainment, under managing director Neerav Tomar and chief operating officer Rahul Trehan, and her fees today sit in the mid-seven to low-eight figures per deal. That places her among the very small group of Indian women athletes who can command that kind of money outside cricket.
A government job as the quiet safety net
Endorsement money is unpredictable. It depends on form, on medals, on staying injury-free in a sport where injury is almost guaranteed. So underneath the glamour of brand deals sits a much less glamorous but more reliable layer of income: the Indian state.
In January 2022, the Manipur Police made Chanu an Additional Superintendent of Police for Sports. She had earlier worked as an Officer on Special Duty with the Northeast Frontier Railway, in a role that began, notably, as a ticket collector.
Add to that the direct rewards for performance. The Railways gave her ₹2 crore after her Tokyo silver, along with the job promotion. The Manipur government added ₹1 crore. BYJU’S gave ₹1 crore. The BCCI, cricket’s own board, handed her ₹50 lakh. The Indian Olympic Association gave ₹40 lakh, JSW Group ₹20 lakh.
Then there is the money nobody sees on a highlight reel: the Target Olympic Podium Scheme paid out ₹51.51 lakh across her Tokyo cycle for out-of-pocket allowances, equipment and training. The Sports Ministry allocated ₹2.74 crore for her Paris cycle, covering international training and rehabilitation in the United States.
After a hip injury nearly ended her Asian Games campaign in 2023, the Mission Olympic Cell approved a further ₹18.79 lakh specifically for that recovery.
Put these numbers together and a picture emerges that is easy to miss if you only watch the medal ceremonies. An elite Indian weightlifter is not funded by one source. She is funded by a patchwork: government salary, government reward money, targeted rehabilitation grants, and private sponsorship layered on top, each one covering a gap the others leave open.
When the body becomes the business risk
No sponsor, however generous, can protect an athlete from her own joints.
Chanu’s career has been repeatedly interrupted by injury, and each one has come with a cost measured in more than money. A back injury after the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games kept her out for nine months, costing her the Asian Games and World Championships that year.
Shoulder and wrist trouble during her 2022 training cycle threatened her overhead stability, though she still managed a World Championship silver. Worst of all was Hangzhou in 2023, where hip tendonitis during a warm-up attempt forced her to leave the platform in a wheelchair. She finished fourth and did not lift again for four months.
To manage this, her coach Vijay Sharma brought in Dr. Aaron Horschig, a former national-level weightlifter turned physiotherapist based in St. Louis. His analysis found two structural weaknesses.
Her shoulder blade was failing to rotate upward properly during the turnover phase of her snatch, forcing nearby joints to absorb stress they were not built for. And a severe restriction in her hip mobility was stopping her glutes from firing properly, forcing her lower back to compensate under heavy loads.
The fix was not dramatic. It was patient, unglamorous work: retraining her pulling mechanics, strengthening the muscles around her shoulder blade.
After the Hangzhou injury, a slow rebuilding exercise called the lock clam, where she places one foot over the opposite Achilles heel and lifts her knee without moving her pelvis, gently reawakening muscles that four months of inactivity had allowed to waste away.
This is the part of an athlete’s career that sponsorship decks never show. Behind every campaign photo of Chanu smiling with a barbell over her head is a much slower, quieter story of a body being carefully rebuilt, one small exercise at a time, funded by ministry grants that most fans will never hear about.
Even her food is now managed with that same precision. Off season, she still prefers home food, dal, rice, local fish curry.
But to hold her competition weight of around 48 to 49 kg while keeping her explosive power, her diet has become almost clinical: an egg, two slices of bread and five kinds of fruit for breakfast, salmon and tuna and pork belly weighed out to 100 to 150 grams a serving, sourced from suppliers in Norway.
Glasgow delivers the hat-trick
The Commonwealth Games returned to Glasgow this July in a stripped-down form, just ten sports, with wrestling, shooting, badminton and hockey all removed from the program. These were traditionally India’s strongest events.
That change quietly raised the stakes for the athletes who remained, particularly in weightlifting, athletics and boxing. Fewer sports meant fewer chances to win, which meant each remaining medal hope carried more of the country’s expectation.
The Indian Olympic Association had named Chanu the flag bearer for the opening ceremony at the OVO Hydro, a recognition less of ceremony and more of the load she was expected to carry.
She delivered. On July 26, 2026, at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow, Chanu won gold in the women’s 48 kg category, finishing with a total lift of 190kg, 85kg in the snatch and 105kg in the clean and jerk, breaking Games records in all three categories.
It was her third successive Commonwealth Games gold, following her titles at Gold Coast 2018 and Birmingham 2022, and secured India’s first gold medal of the 2026 Games.
At 31, Chanu broke down in tears on the podium during the medal ceremony, a rare public crack in the composure of an athlete who has spent a decade being carefully rebuilt after every injury.
It was a fitting bookend to a career that began with free rides on sand trucks: three Commonwealth Games golds in a row, a feat no other Indian weightlifter has managed, achieved in front of a Glasgow crowd in the same city where she had once won only silver, back in 2014, as a teenager.
Building the road she never had
Chanu already trains younger lifters at the Weightlifting Warriors Academy in Modinagar, founded by Sharma, who received the Dronacharya Award in 2018. The academy runs under the government’s Khelo India program, backed by the Sports Authority of India and Olympic Gold Quest.
A new residential wing opened in June 2025, with room for 60 athletes across 30 rooms. It currently trains 40 children aged 8 to 14 alongside 15 elite athletes.
Her longer-term ambition is a dedicated weightlifting academy back home in Manipur, so the next 12-year-old girl who can lift more than her older brother does not have to wait by a tea stall each morning, hoping a truck is headed the right way.
With a third straight Commonwealth gold now added to an Olympic silver, two World Championship medals and a brand reportedly worth $7 million, that academy looks less like a distant ambition and more like the natural next chapter. Not just medals and cash awards, but a road, literal and otherwise, that the next Mirabai Chanu will not have to hitch a ride to find.