While the finals win is pathbreaking for India who have never won gold at the Games, it was the semis where Gunjan has faced a massive hurdle. She had headed out to the Asian Junior Championships after winning the sub-junior and junior national titles but ended with a silver. Then came the reality punch – she lost the U19 Future Cup final to Bassett, rattled by the southpaw’s left uppercut and gone into a shell.

“When I lost to Lily Bassett earlier, I got defensive in the second and third round. This time, I had some pressure but I had the thought of taking my revenge,” Gunjan told The Indian Express. Bassett is taller and the Indian didn’t want to give her space. “She was starting her attacks through her right and I relied on my right cross and left hook to counter her,” she says. Bassett ended with a standing count in the bout. “She has been the most successful boxer at this level and to defeat her in semis was a big boost ahead of the final,” the feisty Indian added.

Back home father Harbhagwan Yadav was reminding his wife Suman of the fateful day when he tested his daughter’s resolve with a challenge that tested her mind and endurance, while showing his daughter could rule the world – for such was the dominance of the Haryana boxer’s outpunching of Bensalah with a unanimous 5-0 win.

Back in 2024, the then 15-year-old had suffered a semi-final loss in the junior nationals at Rohtak. Harbhagwan took her to the seven acre cotton farmland owned by the joint family at the Dhana Kalan village near Hisar.

The father would ask his daughter to work in the cotton field for a whole day – and the labour entailed back breaking deep ploughing for the 20 cm ridges. Wins and losses are part of the game but he wanted to check her willpower. “Haar jeet toh hoti rehti hai par main iska jazbaa dekha chahta tha. Me and my brother Ram Avatar have tilled our cotton fields for our whole life but I wanted to see Gunjan’s resolve. She did not hesitate and worked on the digging. We rested but she continued and ended up completing the whole field. I realised that day that Gunjan will conquer the world with her willpower and that’s what she has done today winning the Youth Olympic Game title,” Harbhagwan shared while speaking with The Indian Express.

“I had the desire of being a boxer right from the first day but I knew I had to prove it. My father and uncle have done hard labour all their lives and I understood how challenging it was. I took it as a challenge to prove to my father that I can box. I got tired but I did not show. I wanted to box in future and could not have thought of quitting that day,” recalls Gunjan.

In 2021 she had been inspired by watching Neeraj Chopra, and the decision to put her in sport also meant that Gunjan’s mother Suman, who took tuitions in the village, had to shift to Hisar with her daughter and son to stay in a two-room rented floor, with Harbhagwan managing the farmland at their village. “Shuru se hi ziddi hai hamari Gunjan (Gunjan has been adamant from her junior days). She told us that she wants to win a medal in Olympics like Neeraj Chopra and all we could think of was to put her in boxing at Mahavir Stadium. Later she trained at the Manjeet Lohan Boxing Academy,” says uncle Ram Avatar.

Mother Suman started on a job in a school at a salary of Rs 12,000 in Hisar, apart from taking tuitions. The rent was Rs 8,000, and the family barely earned about 30,000 monthly from the farmland. “A lot of times, we took loans from the Kisan credit card as well as local commission agents,” recalls Harbhagwan.

Coach Vikas Lohan, who runs the club in the memory of his deceased brother Manjeet, remembers how making Gunjan physically strong was his first task. “She had good foot movements but the first task was to make her physically strong. So we would spend a lot of time getting her to run 100m, 400m sprints as well as 10km runs on the roads near the village. Once her stamina and endurance power was built, we worked on the technical aspect of her boxing,” he recalls.

Her straight punches were good and they worked on her straight right as well as left hook along with her feet movement. Lohan once boxed on the undercards of Vijender Singh’s professional bouts in 2016, before a nose injury ended his career.

At Dakar, Gunjan started with a unanimous 5-0 win over Atena Sofia Calero of Mexico in the quarter-finals after a bye. Then came Bassett.

Lohan details how his trainee utilised her right cross coupled with left hook to unsettle her opponents in the semi-final and finals. “The English boxer had a strong upper left punch. Gunjan countered her with a right cross as well as her left hook. She showed that again against the Algerian opponent in the final and controlled the bout right from the opening round,” shares Lohan.

National boxing coach Geeta Oinam Chanu believes the Indian boxer will benefit a lot from this outing and the next target will be to move up to 51kg as soon as she can. “Gunjan plays well in the long range and uses her long range both in attack as well as counter attack. Her straight right punch too is very good. With time, she will add more power and that will come in handy when she turns senior and moves to 51kg,” said Chanu.