Manisha Bhanwala at Asian Games 2026: India's 57kg Wrestling Debutante

For all her international medals, an Asian Games appearance has eluded Manisha Bhanwala until now - this will be her first. India's wrestling contingent competes across four days in Nagoya, from 30 September to 3 October, and Manisha's event falls on the final day of action, alongside Antim Panghal (53kg), Aman Sehrawat (men's freestyle 57kg) and Deepak Punia (men's freestyle 97kg).

For all her international medals, an Asian Games appearance has eluded Manisha Bhanwala until now - this will be her first. India's wrestling contingent competes across four days in Nagoya, from 30 September to 3 October, and Manisha's event falls on the final day of action, alongside Antim Panghal (53kg), Aman Sehrawat (men's freestyle 57kg) and Deepak Punia (men's freestyle 97kg).

She arrives in Nagoya on the back of a shift in strategy: after years of campaigning at 62kg and 65kg, Manisha dropped to 57kg for this cycle, a category she opened with a Grand Prix gold in Zagreb in 2026. The move brings fresh competition to study, but it has also put her in a weight class with slightly less depth from the traditional Asian powers, Japan and China a factor that has sharpened India's medal hopes from the category.

Manisha Bhanwala was born on 10 February 1997 in the Rohtak district of Haryana, a region that has produced more of India's top wrestlers than almost anywhere else in the country. Her introduction to the sport wasn't born of ambition but of necessity: her father sent her to a wrestling camp simply to help her lose weight and get fitter, a common enough story among Haryana's akhada culture, where fitness drills often double as a child's first exposure to the sport.

What began as a fitness routine turned into a calling. Manisha stayed on the mat long after the extra weight was gone, and by her late teens she was already representing India on the junior international circuit. Her home state's deep wrestling infrastructure gave her the early platform; it would take a move away from Haryana, to Karnataka's Inspire Institute of Sport, to turn that platform into a senior career.

Manisha's first senior medal of note came early: gold in the 60kg category at the 2016 South Asian Games in Guwahati, a result that marked her out as a wrestler to watch. The bigger breakthrough came through a string of Asian Wrestling Championships medals across the following decade bronze in Ulaanbaatar (2022), bronze in Astana (2023) and bronze in Bishkek (2024) each one chipping away at the gap between her and the continent's best.

That gap closed completely in April 2025. At the Asian Wrestling Championships in Amman, Jordan, Manisha came from 2-7 down against North Korea's Kim Ok-ju in the 62kg final to win 8-7 and claim gold India's first women's freestyle wrestling gold at the Asian Championships in four years. It was the signature result of a career built alongside training partners like Sneh Rana and other Indian athletes who have come up through similar high-performance centres.

Dropping a weight category in the final year of this cycle, most wrestlers would call risky; Manisha has called it necessary. With India's 62kg slot increasingly contested at the national camp, the move to 57kg was as much about finding clear space to compete as it was about her own physical readiness. It has meant rebuilding her power and technique for a lighter, often faster-paced category a process she has approached with the same grounded mindset that has defined her career.

Speaking to IANS ahead of the Games, she summed up her approach simply: training hard enough makes even the toughest task possible. It's a sentiment that fits a wrestler who has spent a decade turning incremental progress bronze, bronze, bronze, then gold into one of Indian wrestling's quieter, more complete success stories, alongside contemporaries such as Avinash Sable and Gulveer Singh, who have followed similarly patient paths to the top of Indian sport.

• A first Asian Games appearance for a wrestler who is already a reigning Asian champion
• A test of her new 57kg category against Asia's best, just months after adopting it
• Another shot at completing a medal collection that already spans the Asian Championships, Grand Prix circuit and South Asian Games

A continuation of the broader story of Indian women's wrestling, built on the same high-performance pathways that have produced athletes like Ayush Shetty across other disciplines.

Manisha Bhanwala's road to Nagoya has been anything but conventional a wrestling career that began as a fitness routine, built through Haryana's akhadas and IIS's high-performance programme, arriving at an Asian Games debut only after a continental title was already in hand. Whatever the colour of her medal on 3 October, her presence on the mat in Nagoya is the result of a career built patiently, one weight class and one tournament at a time. Her full international record is tracked on her Wikipedia profile.