When a young Mirabai Chanu first walked into the weightlifting centre at Khuman Lampak in Imphal in 2006, there was little to suggest she would one day become India’s most decorated weightlifter.Twenty years later, after Mirabai clinched a silver medal in the women’s 49kg category at the Asian Games, her first-ever medal at the continental showpiece, her former coach S Brojendro Singh believes she is still not done.Asian Games Full Coverage | Schedule | Medal Tally“I am very happy for her. She already has an Olympic medal, and I believe she will win another Olympic medal as well,” Singh told TOI. “Now that she has won an Asian Games medal, I believe she can win a medal in Los Angeles, too.”Singh coached Mirabai at the state sports academy at Khuman Lampak Main Stadium from 2006 to 2011, overseeing the now 32-year-old lifter’s formative years in the sport. Those early days, he recalled, were marked by a work ethic that set her apart from her peers.“Whatever she was told to do, she did it. She never missed any instruction. If we asked her to do something, she would complete it exactly as told,” said Singh, who has been coaching at the academy since 2004. “That discipline was different. She was also fearless and never shied away from a challenge.”Not everything was smooth at the beginning. Singh remembered a period when the youngster stopped attending training sessions.“She was absent for almost a month early in 2007. I got worried and went straight to her home. Later, I found out that she had chickenpox. Once she recovered, she returned and continued training,” said the coach, who has trained numerous other international medallists, including Rishikanta Singh and Nirupama Devi.Asked if he had spotted signs of greatness in the teenager, Singh pointed not to extraordinary physical attributes but to her attitude. “Her dedication was exceptional. She listened, she worked hard and she was never afraid. Those qualities made her different from the others,” he said.Mirabai’s rise from Khuman Lampak to the Olympic podium has also inspired a generation of weightlifters in Manipur, but Singh believes athletes with her combination of talent, discipline and determination are rare.“In all my years as a coach, I have not seen another weightlifter quite like Mirabai,” he said. “Many athletes look up to her, but finding someone with her qualities is very difficult.”Having won Olympic silver in Tokyo and now added an elusive Asian Games medal to her collection, after also securing her third Commonwealth Games gold medal, Mirabai may have achieved almost everything in the sport. Yet, if her first coach is to be believed, the story is far from over. “She still has a lot to achieve,” Singh said. “I am confident there is more to come from her.”Long before the Olympic medal, the world title and the Asian Games silver, Mirabai’s days revolved around hitching rides on passing trucks to travel from her village to Imphal for training and helping her family by collecting firewood and carrying water uphill in the hills of Manipur.Two decades on, the resilience forged during those years continues to power one of India’s greatest sporting careers and, if her first coach is right, perhaps another Olympic medal run as well.