Mirabai Chanu looked at the bar. The weight next to it read 117kg. She spread her palms around the bar and squatted. A pause and the bar was on her collar bones. Then she just crumbled, falling down and lying on her side, bar dropping in front of her. The TV screen cut off to show her competitors backstage but behind them one could see Mirabai being carried away by one of India's coaching staff.
At that point her total read 191kg: 83kg in the snatch and 108kg in the clean and jerk (C&J), placing her fourth. In bronze medal position, Thailand's Thanyathon Sukcharoen had lifted 199kg. Mirabai had been aiming to overtake her with that 117kg.
Instead, she ended the Asian Games in fourth place, no medal.
There was something different from the off about the reigning Olympic silver medalist, and not in a good way. Normally, Mirabai walks on to the weightlifting platform shoulders held high, head up, stride purposeful. She knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it. On Saturday, at Hangzhou, that walk was anything but. The shoulders looked tight, the head bowed, the stride betraying nerves.
The difference was even starker on the mat, and that was evident even before the mighty fall on her last lift.
In the snatch, traditionally her weaker event (a more technical lift, where you have to lift the bar clean above your head in one motion), she started with an 83kg and then that's where it stayed. In her second attempt, she lifted it above her head while in the squat before her left wrist appeared to buckle. In her third, she barely made it above her head before she rolled it behind her, her shoulder blades rotating in an awkward looking manner.
There had been reports from the venue that she was struggling with a thigh injury, but she marched out for the clean and jerk (the event in which she held the world record till earlier this month) and started with a lift of 108kg. That was a clean lift, but in her second, she could barely lift the bar to her collarbones in the first move, her wrists buckling, the bar dropping again. Then came that third lift.
It was later confirmed that despite feeling some pain in her thigh during the warm-ups, she went ahead with her six attempts. At present, she is not able to put her foot down or walk properly and she will undergo tests Mumbai to find out the severity of the thigh injury.
Her performance in the competition wasn't too much of a surprise, though, if you'd been following her closely. Mirabai hasn't been at her best ever since winning silver at the World Championships 2022, but that tournament itself had hinted at a bigger issue. Her left wrist had buckled mid-lift in Bogota too, and her recovery from it -- walking a couple of steps forward before stabilizing and then lifting it -- had been pure athletic brilliance. But Hangzhou today showed there the problem hadn't been fixed.
In the Asian Championships, in May this year, she lifted 194kg (94kg + 113kg) and finished sixth after skipping her last two attempts at C&J. Earlier this month, she had gone to the World Championships, weighed in, given an entry weight, and packed her bags.
The thing is, though, even if she'd been at her best, she'd have struggled on Saturday. The Asian Games was always going to be a difficult tournament to medal in: In fact, India's last lifting Asiad medal came in 1998 (Karnam Malleswari's bronze), and this class of 2023 was stacked. Gold medalist Ri Songgum was defending champion and broke both the combined and C&J world records en-route lifting 216 (124). Silver medalist Jiang Huihua is a four-time world champion, and she'd been the one who had taken the C&J world record away from Mirabai last month. They both shattered records, and the minds of those watching, in their battle for 1-2.
For Mirabai, having finished ninth in 2014 (where she lifted 171kg combined) and having missed the 2018 Games due to a back injury, this had been her chance to rubber-stamp her credentials as arguably modern India's greatest lifter. But the dream, at least today, left her a crumpled figure in the arms of her coach.