CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 118 of 120

Correct — A, Karnam Malleswari. Karnam Malleswari won the bronze medal in the women's 69 kilogram weightlifting event at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, lifting 110 kilograms in the snatch and 130 in the clean and jerk for a total of 240. It was the first Olympic medal ever won by an Indian woman, and it was also the only medal India took home from those Games. The event mattered for a second reason — women's weightlifting was contested at the Olympics for the first time at Sydney, so she was among the first group of women in the world to win an Olympic medal in the sport. Every other name in the list belongs to a later generation or to a fourth place, which is what the question is checking.

• (b)Mirabai Chanu — The most instructive wrong answer, because she won her silver in the same sport — weightlifting — at the Tokyo Games of 2020, twenty-one years after Malleswari. Same discipline, wrong generation.
• (c)P.T. Usha — The name most Indians reach for, and the reason this question is set. She finished fourth in the 400 metres hurdles at the Los Angeles Games of 1984 and so did not take a medal, despite being the country's most celebrated woman athlete of that era.
• (d)P.V. Sindhu — Sindhu won silver in badminton at Rio in 2016 and bronze at Tokyo in 2020, making her the first Indian woman with two individual Olympic medals — but the first medal of all was Malleswari's, sixteen years before her.

India's Olympic record for individual medals is short enough to be learned as a list, and the women's entries in it begin in 2000. Karnam Malleswari, from Andhra Pradesh, came out of a weightlifting tradition that had already produced world championship medals for Indian women in the 1990s, and Sydney gave that tradition its Olympic platform when women's weightlifting entered the programme.

The trap here is affection rather than ignorance. P. T. Usha is the best-known Indian sportswoman of the twentieth century and is popularly remembered as having 'just missed' at Los Angeles, and a candidate reasoning from fame rather than from the medal table will pick her. The discipline the question rewards is separating famous from medalled, and then separating first from most recent. A clean way to hold the sequence is by decade — Malleswari in 2000, Sindhu from 2016, Chanu and the larger Tokyo group in 2020 — and to remember that Malleswari's bronze stood alone as India's entire haul from the Sydney Games.

• Karnam Malleswari won bronze in the women's 69 kilogram weightlifting event at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.
• Her total was 240 kilograms — 110 in the snatch and 130 in the clean and jerk.
• It was the first Olympic medal won by an Indian woman, and the only medal India won at those Games.
• P. V. Sindhu won silver in badminton at Rio in 2016 and bronze at Tokyo in 2020.
• Mirabai Chanu won silver in weightlifting at the Tokyo Games in 2020.

• Choosing the most famous name rather than the first medallist.
• Assuming the first woman medallist must be from a popular spectator sport; it was weightlifting.
• Confusing 'first Indian woman to win a medal' with 'first Indian woman to win two medals', which is a different record.

As a first-in-India sports item, or as a match between athletes, their sports and the Games at which they medalled.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Karnam Malleswari won her Olympic medal in which sport?

  • (a)Athletics
  • (b)Weightlifting
  • (c)Shooting
  • (d)Wrestling

  Answer(b) Weightlifting — bronze in the women's 69 kg event at Sydney in 2000, with a total of 240 kilograms.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  At which Olympic Games did India win only a single medal, taken by a woman?

  • (a)Atlanta 1996
  • (b)Sydney 2000
  • (c)Athens 2004
  • (d)Beijing 2008

  Answer(b) Sydney 2000 — Karnam Malleswari's weightlifting bronze was India's entire haul from those Games.