Kaluwas is a village about five kilometres outside Bhiwani in Haryana, in a district so associated with the sport that it is routinely called India's Little Cuba. Vijender Singh Beniwal was born there on 29 October 1985, the son of a Haryana Roadways bus driver, and in August 2008 in Beijing he became the first Indian boxer in history to win an Olympic medal. Indian boxing before and after that afternoon are two different things.

Bhiwani

His father, Mahipal Singh Beniwal, drove buses for the state transport corporation and took extra shifts to pay for his sons' training. His elder brother Manoj boxed first and joined the Indian Army, and it was Manoj who took him to the Bhiwani Boxing Club, run by the coach Jagdish Singh. The club operated on almost nothing: a shed, worn equipment, and a stream of farmers' sons who came in at dawn before school.

Vijender was quick and unusually tall for the weight, with a long reach and a counterpunching style that suited the amateur scoring system of the period. He won junior national titles, went to the Athens Olympics in 2004 while still a teenager and lost in the first round, and came back with a silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in the welterweight division and a bronze at the Doha Asian Games the same year.

Beijing

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics he fought in the middleweight division at 75 kilograms. He beat Badou Jack of Gambia, then Angkhan Chomphuphuang of Thailand, and then in the quarter-final defeated Carlos Gongora of Ecuador to guarantee at least a bronze. He lost the semi-final to Cuba's Emilio Correa. The bronze was the first Olympic medal ever won by an Indian boxer.

Its effect was disproportionate to the colour of the metal. Boxing in India had been a marginal, badly funded sport confined largely to the services and to a few pockets like Bhiwani and Manipur. After Beijing, sponsorship arrived, the federation's budget grew, and a generation of boxers in small towns had a name to point at. Vijender was also the first Indian to reach the top of the international amateur middleweight rankings, and in 2009 at the World Amateur Championships in Milan he took bronze, again the first for an Indian boxer.

He added a gold medal at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, a bronze at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi and a silver at the 2014 Games in Glasgow. He was given the Arjuna Award in 2006, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, in 2009, and the Padma Shri in January 2010.

Turning Professional

In June 2015 he did something no Indian boxer of his standing had done: he signed a professional contract, with Queensberry Promotions in Britain, and moved to Manchester to train. It was a genuine risk. He was thirty, he was giving up a secure position in the Indian amateur system, and Indian professional boxing effectively did not exist.

He won his first ten professional fights, most inside the distance, and took the WBO Asia Pacific super-middleweight title in 2016 by beating Kerry Hope in Delhi, and later the WBO Oriental title. His record stood at thirteen wins against one loss as of 2022. He also appeared in Hindi films, most notably Fugly in 2014, and served as a Deputy Superintendent of Police in Haryana.

Public Life

He entered electoral politics in 2019, contesting the South Delhi Lok Sabha seat for the Indian National Congress. He was not elected. In April 2024 he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. He has also spoken publicly on issues within Indian sport, including in support of wrestlers protesting against the leadership of their federation.

Away from competition he became one of the first Indian athletes outside cricket to be a genuinely national commercial and media presence, appearing in advertising, on television and in film. That visibility was itself part of the shift he caused. Before 2008, an Indian Olympic sport other than hockey or shooting had almost no commercial value; afterwards, boxing and wrestling became sports that a family in Haryana or Manipur could plausibly imagine as a career for a child rather than a hobby to be abandoned at eighteen.

His significance is best measured by what came after him. Mary Kom's global success ran in parallel; Shiva Thapa, Amit Panghal, Lovlina Borgohain and a long list of others came through a system that had money and attention in it because of what he did in Beijing. Bhiwani itself produced three more Olympic boxers in the years immediately following.

Vijender Singh remains, in the plainest terms, the man who proved an Indian could medal in Olympic boxing, and he did it having learned the sport in a shed near a village of a few thousand people in Haryana. He has continued to train and to fight professionally, and to return regularly to Kaluwas and Bhiwani, where the club that made him still runs.