Mother-daughter arm wrestling duo from Malappuram wins national medals

Malappuram’s Febina Beevi and her daughter Fella Mariyam turned the 6th BCAI National Arm Wrestling Championship in Bengaluru into a rare family breakthrough, with Fella striking gold in the Under-15 right-hand 63 kg category and silver in the left-hand division, while Febina took bronze in Masters 78 kg left-hand. Fella’s two-medal haul also booked her a place at the World Arm Wrestling Championship in Japan, giving the family an immediate international target after their national success.

What makes the result matter is not just the medals, but the way this pair built them together. Fella, an eighth-grade student at Sacred Heart CMI Public School in Perinthalmanna, came to arm wrestling after earlier stints in badminton and chess. Her interest sharpened after she heard about Perinthalmanna athlete Janna Fathima, then asked her father, Shahnavas, if she could try the sport. That decision sent her to the Pattikkad Fit Fam gym academy, where she has trained for about a year under coach Asif.

Febina’s path was even more striking. She works as head of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Perinthalmanna M.E.A. Engineering College, but when she was already accompanying her daughter to training, she decided to take up arm wrestling herself. She had been training for about six months at the time of the feature, and the bronze she earned in Bengaluru showed that the family’s commitment was not limited to cheering from the sideline. It was shared work, built on the same mats, under the same coaching, and with the same discipline.

That shared training base matters in a sport where women’s participation still depends heavily on local gym ecosystems, family encouragement and access to coaching. The Fit Fam setup in Pattikkad is a reminder that arm wrestling talent in Kerala is often being formed outside big institutional pipelines, in places where parents and children can enter the sport together and stay in it together. In that sense, Febina and Fella’s result is larger than novelty: it suggests a model for retention, where women do not just try arm wrestling once, but keep competing, medaling and passing the sport across generations.

The timing also gives the performance wider significance. The International Federation of Armwrestling lists the 2026 World Armwrestling Championship in Japan for September 22-28, and Fella’s qualification places her directly on that stage. The Indian Arm Wrestling Federation says the sport was introduced in India in the early 1970s, and that long arc makes this mother-daughter run feel especially important: a niche strength sport is now producing family stories, female medalists and international qualifiers from a district town in Kerala.