Toka to Podium: Patiala's Harjinder Kaur Lifts Personal Best to Silver at CWG 2026
Harjinder Kaur Silver: Punjab’s Harjinder Kaur wins silver with a personal-best 227kg lift at Glasgow 2026, as Gulveer Singh adds a second Indian silver in the Men’s 10,000m.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, July 29
Harjinder Kaur has turned a childhood spent hand-cranking a chaff-cutter into a Commonwealth Games silver medal. The Punjab weightlifter, born in Mehas village near Nabha and trained out of NSNIS Patiala, lifted a personal-best total of 227kg in the Women’s 69kg final at Glasgow 2026 — 101kg in snatch and 126kg in clean and jerk, both personal bests — to go one better than the bronze she won at Birmingham 2022.
ALSO READ: India Medal Tally at CWG 2026
Harjinder Kaur Silver Story
The story behind the lift is as striking as the number itself. Harjinder grew up in a landless farming family in a single-room house, where money for training was scarce. For years, her real strength training wasn’t in a gym — it was hours spent each day operating a heavy chaff-cutting machine by hand to prepare cattle fodder, work that built the upper-body power she’d later put to use on a lifting platform. Before any of that, she wasn’t even a weightlifter: she started out as a Kabaddi raider, cycling five kilometres a day just to train, and only discovered the sport that would define her career at the age of 20, at Punjabi University in Patiala.
Harjinder Kaur Silver: Once she switched in 2016, the rise was steady rather than sudden — an Inter-University title, a state championship, and by 2021, a Commonwealth Championship silver that signalled her arrival on the international stage.
Harjinder Kaur Silver: Birmingham 2022 followed with a bronze. Glasgow 2026 is her best yet, backed by a training block at NSNIS Patiala and an acclimatization camp in Birmingham in the weeks before the Games — support that came through India’s national coaching and preparation system in the run-up to this cycle.
Gulveer Singh Adds a Second Silver for India on the Track
India’s medal count for the day didn’t stop in the weightlifting hall. Naib Subedar Gulveer Singh, competing for the Indian Army and one of the country’s TOPS-backed core athletes, clocked 27:49.78 to take silver in the Men’s 10,000m final — a result that fits a career built on rewriting Indian distance-running records.
Gulveer’s own journey started far from an athletics track, on the village roads and farmland trails of Sirsa in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, before he joined the Grenadiers Regiment in 2018.
He’s since become the country’s premier long-distance runner: double gold in the 5000m and 10,000m at the 2025 Asian Athletics Championships, and a run of national records that includes becoming the first Indian to break the 4-minute mile and the first to run a half marathon under an hour.
Training out of the high-performance centre in Colorado Springs, his Glasgow silver adds an Olympic-cycle medal to a résumé already among the strongest in Indian athletics history.
Between them, Harjinder and Gulveer gave India two silvers on a single day of competition — one forged on a Punjab farm, the other on an Uttar Pradesh village road, both eventually shaped by elite training systems thousands of kilometres from home.
ALSO READ: India Medal Tally at CWG 2026
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