Mirabai Chanu to skip World Weightlifting Championship 2021
Tokyo 2020 silver medalist, weightlifter Mirabai Chanu has opted to skip World Weightlifting Championships 2021, to be held from December 7 to 17 in Uzbekistan as per a report in Times of India. The Manipuri is a former world champion and had won a gold medal in the 2017 edition of the competition.
Her decision to withdraw from the World Championship comes after she failed to master her new snatch technique. Right after the Tokyo Games, she started working on it with the chief coach Vijay Sharma, at NIS Patiala.
At any given competition, a lifter has to compete in two categories -- snatch and clean and jerk. While Chanu holds the world record in the clean and jerk in her weight category (119kg), the best in snatch is only 88kg, while the world record stands at 96kg.
This was a grey area in the Tokyo Games too, where the Chinese lifter Hou Zhihui, who won the gold, was seven Kg clear of Chanu, in the snatch category.
The World Championship would have been the first competition that Chanu would have taken part in since the Olympics, after the Commonwealth Championship was cancelled in October. Now she would be seen in action at the Commonwealth Games 2022 in Birmingham, in July.