Sanket Sargar on Saturday won silver medal in Men’s 55kg weightlifting to give India their first medal in the ongoing Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
Sanket snatched 113kg and clean and jerked 135 kg for a total of 248kg in the men’s 55kg weight division to record his name in history books.
Who Is Sanket Sargar?
Sanket hails from Sangli in South Maharashtra. His family moved here in the 1990s from a village. Sanket had a very modest upbringing with his father selling paan to earn livelihood for the family.
His father first sold fruits on roadside before starting a paan shop. The paan shop was named Sanket Paan. The family then opened a tea and breakfast stall next to the paan shop.
Growing up as a child, the Commonwealth Games medallist always helped his father in running the ipaan shop.
When he was 12, his father got him enrolled in a local fitness centre.
“The first time I did weightlifting, I didn’t think if it was hard or easy. They taught, and I kept learning. The more I learned, the more I kept getting better. I knew I had to do it, so I used to,” Sanket was quoted by the Sportsstar website.
Sanket says he started taking the sport a little more seriously a couple of years after he started. “For the first two years, forget about the international level, I didn’t even know about competitions at the national level. I didn’t know how to prepare for the district level. I’d take part in these events without training specifically for them. I took part in a divisional competition in class 9, and without really training hard for it, I got a silver.
