Raipur (Chhattisgarh) [India], March 27 (ANI): ‘Perhaps he is busy on the building web site,’ Monikha Sonowal quipped as she tried calling her father once more.
Moments earlier, Monikha had clinched the gold medal within the ladies’s 48kg weightlifting class on the inaugural Khelo India Tribal Games 2026 in Raipur and needed to convey the news to her father, Padmadhar Sonowal, a mason who spends lengthy days at building websites to assist his household of 4 and has been the 19-year-old’s greatest supporter in her sporting journey.
Elder of the 2 siblings, Monikha hails from Batghoria Penbeni Chowk, a small and largely unnoticed locality in Assam’s Dhemaji district, positioned on the north financial institution of the Brahmaputra River and located roughly 425 kms away from Guwahati. Life there strikes at a quiet, unhurried tempo, and for many households within the village, desires hardly ever stretch past household tasks and making ends meet, in keeping with a press launch from the KITG 2026.
But for Monikha, the sound of barbells inside a weightlifting corridor grew to become the soundtrack of a dream that refused to remain small. Despite restricted assets, her curiosity in direction of the game regularly reworked right into a ardour, impressed by the worldwide success of Tokyo Olympics silver medallist Mirabai Chanu from neighbouring Manipur.
And on Thursday, that dream reworked right into a second of nationwide glory as she battled a knee harm to clinch the primary weightlifting gold medal of the Games, capping off the onerous work she had been placing in ever since she took up the game a number of years in the past.
A significant turning level in her journey got here two years in the past when she joined the Sports Authority of India’s National Centre of Excellence (NCOE) in Itanagar. ‘The NCOE Itanagar gave me all the things an athlete from a small village like mine might solely dream of. Proper coaching, diet and steering, together with harm administration. Without that assist, reaching this stage would have been very tough,’ stated Monikha, who belongs to the Kachari Tribe.
Her progress since then has been regular. Monikha received gold on the School Nationals in 2023, adopted by a silver medal on the Khelo India ASMITA League in Sambalpur, Odisha, in 2024. In 2025, she secured a bronze medal on the State Championships in Tezpur and completed eighth on the Inter-University Championships in Chandigarh.
But the street to her newest triumph was removed from clean. For the previous three months, Monikha, a BA second-semester pupil at Dhemaji City College, had been combating a proper knee harm sustained throughout coaching.
Concerned about aggravating the issue, her coaches suggested her to skip the Khelo India Tribal Games. But the 19-year-old weightlifter couldn’t convey herself to remain away. Monika selected to compete and struggle via the ache.
‘My coaches have been frightened about my knee and advised me it is likely to be higher to relaxation,’ she recalled. ‘But alternatives just like the Khelo India Tribal Games do not come typically. I did not need to miss competing on such a giant stage.
‘I need to preserve enhancing and characterize India someday. This gold is only the start,’ Monikha added. (ANI)