Fourteen years ago, an 11-year-old with more energy than she knew what to do with, watched Vijender Singh box on television and decided to try it herself. Last week in Glasgow, at her first Commonwealth Games, Sakshi Chaudhary beat England’s Ruby White 5-0 in the women’s 51kg final — a unanimous decision, and India’s newest boxing gold.It came down to three rounds in Glasgow, and she is still processing it. “It meant a lot to me. I have been playing for 14 years, and I have won a gold medal for my country,” she says. “I am feeling very good.”Those 14 years began with no ambition at all. “I was young and very naughty,” she says of the girl who first walked into a gym at 11. “To channelise my energy, I started boxing.” What came after, in her own description, was a roller-coaster — golds in some years, losses in others, and then a shoulder injury that cost her all of 2023 and pushed her out of major competition altogether. It was somewhere in that stretch that Virat Kohli sponsored her for three years. “I have been very influenced by him,” she says. “I like his journey and everything about him. As an athlete, I take inspiration from him.”The turn came in December 2022, when she joined the Indian Army. She now trains at the Army Sports Institute in Pune, which she rates as the best boxing programme in the country. “I say very proudly that I am in the Indian Army. The discipline there helps you become an athlete,” she says. “The coaches train us individually, and our sparring partners are boys, so my game improved a lot after joining.”That discipline is not an abstraction. It is a timetable that runs from waking to sleeping, training, rest, meals, and a diary written at the same hour every evening. “Discipline comes above everything in my life,” she says. It showed at Glasgow, where no bout came close; she won her fights and won them clearly. But she has a method for the ones that turn. “I motivate myself that I have to come back, that I have to change my strategy,” she says. In the seconds between rounds, the coaches call out what isn’t working, and she adjusts.Next is the Asian Games in Japan, and another gold. Beyond that sits the ambition every boxer eventually names: the 2028 Olympics. But ask what the sport has actually given her, and the answer is not a medal.“Never accept defeat,” she says. “You will be down sometimes, you will lose sometimes and win sometimes, but you must not give up. That is what boxing taught me.”
Sakshi Chaudhary (BCCL/ @sak_.shi)