PM Modi meets Karnam Malleswari in Yamunanagar, commends Olympic medallist for mentoring young athletes

PM Modi inaugurated and laid the foundation stone of various development projects in Yamuna Nagar, Haryana on Monday where he met the former weightlifter and shared a glimpse of the meeting on social media platform X.

"Met Olympic medalist and noted athlete, Karnam Malleswari in Yamunanagar yesterday. India is proud of her success as a sportswoman. Equally commendable is her effort to mentor young athletes," PM Modi shared on X.

Karnam is an Olympic medallist, a two-time world champion and a two-time Asian Games silver medal winner.

Having retired from the sport in 2004, the 49-year-old, along with her weightlifter husband Rajesh Tyagi, opened her first academy in Yamunanagar, Haryana in 2017.

Karnam holds the distinguished honour of being the first woman from India to win a medal at the Olympics.

Her career's crowning achievement came at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Lifting 110kg and 130kg in the 'snatch' and 'clean and jerk' categories respectively to total 240kg, Karnam Malleswari became the first Indian woman to win a prestigious Olympic bronze medal.

Karnam placed third in the World Championships in 1993 and then followed up with consecutive 54kg world titles in 1994 and 1995, before bookending her run with another third-place effort in 1996.

On two occasions, in 1994 and 1998, she narrowly missed on Asian Games gold medals, having to settle for silver instead.

She was conferred with numerous prestigious awards by the Indian government, including the Arjuna Award (1994), Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna (1999) and the Padma Shri (1999).

Besides her sporting achievements, the Olympic medallist also founded the Karnam Malleswari Foundation, a first-of-its-kind weightlifting and powerlifting academy in an effort to see her beloved sport flourish in India.