Most people haven’t yet heard of Linthoi Chanambam, but she is one of India’s brightest young athletes, a phenomenal talent in a sport that has historically seen little interest in the country.
Last week, the 16-year-old won gold at the World Cadet Judo Championship in Sarajevo. The win is quite literally historic; she is India’s first-ever judo champion, in any category and in any age group (Cadet is 15-18 years).
How did she do it, with so little infrastructure for this sport, at this level? Through a judo programme run by the industrial house JSW at its Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS) in Bellary, Karnataka. This is inarguably India’s finest multi-sport training facility. One of its programmes works specifically on sports that have a very small footprint in India. The programme works to build such sports from the ground up, identifying the finest young talent through extensive scouting and then developing that talent over a decade.
That was the brief given to Mamuka Kizilashvili, a renowned Georgian coach who has produced Olympic champions, and who now heads the IIS judo programme. Kizilashvili honed in on Chanambam during his initial months of scouting for talent, back in 2017. She was 11 then, and as hard as it was, she eventually decided to leave her home in Manipur and, with her parents’ blessing, move to the IIS campus thousands of kilometres away.
“She was a phenom from the start,” says Manisha Malhotra, a former tennis international who heads JSW Sport’s Sports Excellence and Scouting division. “A standout among the 70 judokas who are in the programme. She has that X-factor. I can see it, having been around high-performance athletes all my life, but I cannot describe it. For example, her pain threshold is off the charts. I remember she had a broken thumb when she was 12. It was painful for me to even look at it, but she was waving her hand around and saying ‘Little pain, no problem, I can fight!’”
Chanambam’s physical attributes remind her of Oddjob, the henchman from the James Bond films, played by the late Harold Sakata, Malhotra adds. In real life, Sakata was an Olympic medal-winning weightlifter and a wrestler; on screen, his muscle-bound, deadly-bowler-hat-wearing turn in the 1964 film Goldfinger shot him to fame. “Linthoi too is a tank,” Malhotra says.
It’s been an eventful few years for the teen. In 2020, when the world went into lockdown, Chanambam and a few other IIS judokas were training in Georgia and found themselves unable to fly out. What followed was her most wonderful adventure so far, she says. She moved in with coach Kizilashvili’s extended family, and had the unique experience of training for months alongside some of Georgia’s finest judokas, including world champions from different age groups, some of them Olympians.
In keeping with her growing affinity for the Balkan region, Chanambam’s idol is the retired Olympic champion Majlinda Kelmendi from Kosovo. Kelmendi was a prodigy from a small town who became one of judo’s legends, a two-time world champion, four-time European champion, and Kosovo’s first and only Olympic gold medallist.
It’s a journey that Chanambam wants to emulate.