Commonwealth Games 2026: All you need to know about Manpreet Kaur

Manpreet Kaur will return to the Commonwealth Games stage when she represents India at the 2026 edition in Glasgow.

Manpreet was born in Ambala, Haryana, into a family where sport was not the obvious path. Her father, a farmer, passed away when she was just 13, and soon after, her mother was left paralysed.

It was a difficult start for a teenager who had not yet found her sport. Manpreet's introduction to athletics came through her cousins, one a 100m sprinter and the other a discus thrower.

It was her father who first encouraged her to take up sport after watching them compete.

Early Life

She began as a 100m sprinter, training for a year before her cousin introduced her to shot put, convinced she had a better chance of excelling in the throwing circle.

The decision proved fruitful. After completing Class 12, Manpreet secured a job with the Indian Railways, which gave her the financial stability to pursue her graduation and her sporting career simultaneously.

Manpreet's international debut came at the 2006 Asian Junior Championship, where she finished 8th.

She continued to progress through the junior ranks and, in 2015, won gold at the National Open Athletics Championships in Kolkata with a throw of 17.96m. The effort set a new national record and secured her qualification for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

She became the only Indian woman to qualify for the shot put event at those Games, finishing 23rd overall with a throw of 17.06m.

At the Asian Grand Prix in Jinhua, China, Manpreet produced a throw of 18.86m, a mark that was world-leading at the time and took her to the top of the global rankings that season. She followed it up by winning gold at the Asian Athletics Championships in Bhubaneswar.

However, both results were later struck from the record books. Manpreet tested positive on four separate occasions in 2017, at the Jinhua Grand Prix, the Federation Cup in Patiala, the Asian Championships in Bhubaneswar and the Inter-State Championships in Guntur.

In April 2019, the National Anti-Doping Agency handed her a four-year ban, backdated to her provisional suspension on July 20, 2017.

All her competitive results from that date were disqualified, costing her the Asian Championships gold medal and her 18.86m national record.

The comeback

The ban would have ended most careers. Manpreet's did not.

She returned to the circuit and, in June 2022, produced a throw of 18.06m in Chennai to reclaim the national record and seal her place at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games.

At Birmingham, she qualified for the final with a best effort of 16.78m, finishing seventh in the qualification round, before placing 12th in the final with a throw of 15.59m.

In 2023, she added an Asian Athletics Championships bronze medal in Bangkok with a throw of 17.00m, finishing behind Abha Khatua, who won silver, and China's Song Jiayuan, who took gold.

Weeks later, at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, Manpreet finished fifth in the final with 16.25m, as teammate Kiran Baliyan claimed bronze, India's first Asian Games medal in the event since 1951.

Her national record stood until May 2024, when Abha Khatua threw 18.41m at the Federation Cup in Bhubaneswar to surpass the mark Manpreet had set in Chennai.

The record has since changed hands. The story of how Manpreet got there, through personal loss, suspension and a comeback that few expected, remains uniquely hers.