Karnam Malleswari Lifted 240 kg at Sydney on 19 September 2000 to Win Bronze, India's First Olympic Medal by a Woman and the Country's Only Medal of Those Games

On 19 September 2000, at the Sydney Convention Centre, Karnam Malleswari lifted 110 kg in the snatch and 130 kg in the clean and jerk, a 240 kg total that won bronze in the women’s 69 kg class. Olympedia, the Olympic results database, calls her the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal. Its country page for the Games shows hers as the only medal India won at Sydney.

The result, lift by lift

Fifteen lifters from 13 countries started the 69 kg class, and Olympedia lists the session at 18:30. China’s Lin Weining won gold and Hungary’s Erzsebet Markus-Peresztegi took silver. Both finished on 242.5 kg, and both totals are marked as Olympic records in the database. Malleswari’s 240 kg left her 2.5 kg behind them.

Bodyweight settled the tie at the top. Markus-Peresztegi weighed 68.52 kg and Lin 66.74 kg, so the lighter Chinese lifter took gold. Malleswari weighed 67.90 kg. Her lifts, in Olympedia’s record, were 110 kg in the snatch, level for second best with Lin, and 130 kg in the clean and jerk, level with Markus-Peresztegi. Lin’s 132.5 kg was the best clean and jerk of the day, shared with two Bulgarians.

Milena Trendafilova and Daniela Kerkelova, the two Bulgarians, finished fourth and fifth on 232.5 kg, 7.5 kg behind the Indian lifter.

A first Olympics for women’s weightlifting

Women’s weightlifting made its Olympic debut at Sydney. Seven women’s classes were added, Olympedia says, and the men’s programme was cut from ten events to eight to make room, giving 15 medal events in all. Each country could enter women in no more than four of the seven classes.

India sent 65 athletes, 44 men and 21 women, by Olympedia’s count. Two of the women were lifters: Malleswari, and Sanamacha Chanu, who finished sixth in the 53 kg class. Scroll notes that India had won a single medal across the four previous Games, Leander Paes’s tennis bronze in 1996, and counts Malleswari’s bronze as India’s third individual Olympic medal, after Khashaba Jadhav’s wrestling bronze in 1952 and Paes. Olympedia also lists two athletics silvers from 1900 under India, a claim covered in tuput’s account of Jadhav’s Helsinki bronze, so the count depends on whether they are included.

From a Srikakulam gym to the world podium

She was born on 1 June 1975 in Voosavanipeta, in Andhra Pradesh’s Srikakulam district, Olympedia says. A 2020 Scroll interview has her first walking into a gym near her school at 12. The local coach, Neelamshetty Appanna, turned her away as too thin and weak. Her sisters also took up lifting, and Scroll says her mother’s support kept her going.

She told Scroll there was little equipment: she and her sisters practised on mud with a local barbell that bent and had to be straightened. Scroll says India’s Russian coach noticed her at a national camp in Bangalore, where her sister was training ahead of the 1990 Asian Games. At her first junior nationals, in Udaipur in 1990, Scroll says she broke nine national records in the 52 kg class.

Results at the international level came quickly. Scroll and The Bridge both report that she took bronze in the 54 kg class at the 1993 World Championships in Melbourne and gold at Istanbul in 1994, becoming the first Indian woman to be world champion. Guangzhou in 1995 brought a second title, and the 1996 worlds a bronze. In between, Olympedia lists Asian Games silver medals for her in 1994 at Hiroshima (54 kg) and in 1998 at Bangkok (63 kg).

A world record is also on her Olympedia page in the 54 kg clean and jerk: 113.0 kg at Guangzhou on 19 November 1995, a mark that stood until 5 April 1996. Women’s weightlifting was not yet an Olympic sport, so none of this could count toward a Games.

Moving up a class for Sydney

By 2000 she was 25. Scroll says she was advised to move from 63 kg, where she had won the 1998 Asian Games silver, to 69 kg, a class she had not contested at an international event. Critics had written her off, the piece adds, because she won no world title between 1996 and 1999.

At 69 kg she faced a Chinese team that, in Olympedia’s account, had won the world title from 1997 to 1999 with three different lifters, and it entered Lin Weining for Sydney. Malleswari finished 7.5 kg clear of the rest of the field.

The last attempt

In Scroll’s lift-by-lift account she opens the snatch at 105 kg, then 107.5 kg and 110 kg, all successful. The clean and jerk went 125 kg, then 130 kg, which put her on 240 kg. Lin had cleared 132.5 kg on her first try, and Markus-Peresztegi matched Lin’s total with a 130 kg lift.

For her last attempt she asked for 137.5 kg, which would have given her a 247.5 kg total. She missed it, and Scroll reports that Lin and Markus-Peresztegi missed their own last tries too. By Olympedia’s figures, a 132.5 kg lift would have tied her with the other two on 242.5 kg, and the bodyweight tiebreak would have given Lin gold and her silver. Scroll puts the gold-winning figure at 133 kg.

Two explanations of the miss are on record. Scroll’s reports attribute the choice of 137.5 kg to a miscalculation by her coaches and say she regrets it. In an Outlook interview published in June 2016 she said the bar hit her neck on the lift, that she blacked out and lost her footing, and that she had lifted more than 137.5 kg in practice. “It was not due to nervousness. It was not in my destiny to win the gold,” she told the magazine.

She also described the reception at home. “That a girl could win an Olympic medal came as a shock to everyone,” she told Scroll in 2020.

Athens and the honours

Athens in 2004 was her second Games. Olympedia lists her in the 63 kg class on 18 August 2004 with a did-not-finish.

Both of her national honours came before Sydney. The Sports Authority of India’s list of Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna awardees names her for 1994 to 95, and a Press Information Bureau backgrounder says she was the first Indian woman to receive that award. The Gazette of India notification of 26 January 1999 lists her, under the spelling Karnam Malleshawari, among the Padma Shri recipients for sports, weightlifting, from Srikakulam.

In June 2021 the Delhi government appointed her the first vice-chancellor of Delhi Sports University, according to India TV News and the order it quotes from the university’s chancellor.

What followed

The next Indian woman to win an Olympic medal did so 12 years later, Scroll says; its 2020 interview names Mary Kom, Saina Nehwal, P. V. Sindhu and Sakshi Malik as those who followed. tuput covers one of them in its record of P. V. Sindhu’s two Olympic medals.

In weightlifting, India’s second Olympic medal came at Tokyo on 24 July 2021, when Mirabai Chanu took silver in the women’s 49 kg class with 202 kg, 87 kg in the snatch and 115 kg in the clean and jerk. Olympedia calls it India’s second Olympic weightlifting medal, and the Press Information Bureau backgrounder says Chanu joined Malleswari as the country’s second weightlifting medallist and its first to win silver. Olympedia’s medal table for India, as read on 2 November 2026, lists weightlifting at one silver and one bronze.

India will host the senior world championships in 2029, after the International Weightlifting Federation awarded them to Ahmedabad on 25 October 2026. tuput’s report on the Ahmedabad award sets out India’s world championship medals to date.