From grief to gold: Ishani Sirohi's kettlebell odyssey

On a competition floor in Syracuse this past May, Ishani Sirohi hoisted a kettlebell overhead again and again, her breath measured against the clock, her body screaming for rest it would not get. 

When the reps concluded, she had won silver in the half snatch and bronze in the military snatch at the IKMF World Championship — two more medals in a haul that now numbers a dozen, earned across four continents, by an athlete wielding a rather unusual tool that several in her city would fail to recognise.

Grief becomes her gym

Sirohi's introduction to kettlebell sport back in November 2019 was almost accidental.

She walked into a training session and watched a weightlifter work through a set with his palms split open and bleeding. It was not the toughness alone that captured her attention. Instead, it was the demand for strength and stamina, all at once, and a discipline that asked the body to be powerful and unshakeable with every lift.

Until then, she had understood sport as a choice between endurance and force. Kettlebell training offered no such choice, and yet, she was instantly drawn to it.

Interestingly, the timing mattered just as much as the discovery.

Her mother, a former Army doctor, had recently been diagnosed with dementia. The following year, Sirohi would lose her father, a Colonel in the Armoured Corps and the fifth generation of his family to serve India.

Grief and uncertainty crowded her for days.

"Training became much more than exercise during that period," Sirohi tells The Bridge. "It gave me structure when life outside the gym felt uncertain, and eventually became something I could channel my grief, energy and focus into."

The outlet gradually transformed into a purpose, and that very purpose accelerated swiftly once she began competing.

Her first World Championship came in 2022, on home soil in India, where she won two silver medals in the snatch and one-arm jerk.

"That experience changed the scale of my ambition," she tells this writer. 

 Over the next four years, Sirohi represented India at IUKL World Championships in Kyrgyzstan and Greece, at the IUKL World Cup in St. Petersburg, Russia, and at a championship in Haining, China, before arriving in Syracuse this year for her IKMF debut.

At the 2024 Kyrgyzstan championships, she won gold in the biathlon and a team relay jerk title alongside another silver in the snatch. The same year in Greece, two more silvers followed. A year later in China, she helped India's women's team to gold in the relay and added an individual bronze.

After five World Championship appearances in six countries and across four continents, Sirohi has now gradually built a commendable resume, one gruelling set at a time, in a sport that offers its athletes little beyond the satisfaction of the lift itself.

India's modest kettlebell community

That scarcity is the backdrop against which Sirohi's career must be understood.

Kettlebell sport remains a small community in India - roughly 250 active competitors exist at the national level, by her estimate, with about 150 gathering at the recent KSIA Nationals in Shirdi.

Also, the sport carries none of the funding, visibility or institutional support that other established Olympic disciplines enjoy. Athletes largely finance their own training, travel, visas and competition fees.

 And yet, miraculously, the sport is growing, and Sirohi points with particular pride to the rising number of women stepping onto the platform.

"There is something powerful about seeing women who may never have considered themselves athletes discover what their bodies are capable of," she says, describing a country where strength sports have long carried gendered assumptions about who gets to compete.

With a full-time day job, Sirohi funds her own travels, much like the way most of her peers do. She works in brand communications for a US-based fitness-technology company, fitting Olympic-calibre training around a full-time career.

"Balancing the two is demanding," she says, "but it has also taught me that being an athlete doesn't have to exist separately from having a career."

Her hope now reaches beyond her own medal count — toward an India where kettlebell sport is visible and sustainable enough that the athletes who follow her will not have to build that same fragile balance alone.