PARIS – In India, the female wrestler Vinesh Phogat is something of a national hero. She seemed on the edge Wednesday of becoming one of the great stories – anywhere – of 21st century Olympic history, one you would make a documentary about, or even a feature film with soaring background music.
In her case, since her family has already been the subject of one movie – a second Bollywood blockbuster.
The script, please, because as her Twitter/X bio reads, “One day, all of your hard work will pay off,” and as of Tuesday night, Vinesh Phogat had put herself in position to maybe be India’s first female individual Olympic gold medalist.
Vinesh Phogat on Wednesday at a clinic with PT Usha, India Olympic Association president // photo courtesy IOA
Flashback. In Phogat’s Olympic quarterfinal in 2016, she tore her ACL and left on a stretcher. Last August, she had another ACL surgery. Before these Games, she had never placed higher than ninth or third at a world championships. Earlier in 2023, she helped lead an action against India’s national wrestling chief, alleging him of sexual harassment. She and other female wrestlers camped out in the streets of New Delhi for weeks in protests that became a rallying cry against India’s establishment and ended in clashes with police. Some wrestlers had threatened to throw their medals in the Ganges, the country’s holiest river.
Here, in the women’s freestyle under-50 kilogram class, Phogat was drawn into a first-round match against the thought-to-be unbeatable Yui Sasaki of Japan. Sasaki, the defending gold medalist, did not concede even a point at the Tokyo 2020 Games. Phogat played cat-and-mouse until literally seconds were left in the match, finally attacking. Susaki, startled, fell backward, landing on her side, Vinesh on top. The unbeaten one had been vanquished. Through two more matches Tuesday, Phogat kept winning – all the way to, it seemed, becoming the first Indian female to qualify for an Olympic wrestling final.
India has never had an individual female gold medalist. In any sport.
And this is where we have to tear up the script, big time. Cue that screeching sound on the soundtrack.
Because it all blew up. Everything. Sometimes all your hard work does not pay off, and it can seem a cruel joke.
“Everyone here is feeling as if someone in the family has died,” India’s national women’s wrestling team coach, Virender Dahiya, told PTI, the Press Trust of India. “We don’t know what has struck us. Everyone is shocked.”
It all blew up so disastrously, comically and ridiculously that a reasonable person would legitimately have to wonder, truly wonder, what is going on with India’s Olympic sports system because there can be no excuse for what happened Wednesday in the matter of Vinesh Phogat.
She did not make weight.
She was over – per the international wrestling federation, UWW, United World Wrestling – by 100 grams.
That’s maybe six pieces of a medium-size tangerine.
Last week at the Olympic judo tournament, an Algerian fighter did not make weight when facing the prospect of squaring off against an Israeli. The Algerian was disqualified. Did he DQ on purpose? The judo federation says it is investigating.
Here, Vinesh Phogat was to meet the American Sarah Hildebrandt in Wednesday’s final. Seemingly all of India wanted Phogat in the match. India has almost 1.5 billion people. In its history, it has won but 35 Summer Games medals, and but two individual golds, Abhinav Bindra in men’s air rifle shooting in 2008, Neeraj Chopra in javelin in Tokyo in 2020. To compare: Hungary, with not even 10 million people, has more than 500 medals and counting.
All the way up to prime minister Narender Modi, there has been increasing talk in India about the importance of sport in India. The IOC held its annual assembly in Mumbai in 2023. There are rumblings of bidding for the 2036 Summer Olympics.
But that sort of thing depends not just on money – there’s lots of money in India – but on something quite different.
On logistical and technical skill. Organizational competence. Consistency.
And here, given its best hope for a gold medal in women’s sport shining under the global spotlight, at a Games where equality for female athletes has been pushed front and center, the delegation ultimately accountable could not get its first female wrestler to have qualified for an Olympic final ready for the moment. Instead, she weighed 50.1.
It will be natural in India for politicians and others to rush to protect Phogat. Punjab-based Lovely Professional University, for instance, announced a “reward” of about $30,000, saying Phogat had “scripted history,” the university declaring, “For us, Vinesh is still a winner.” She is pursuing a master’s in psychology there.
But while this is about her, it’s so not. It’s about the people around her. This sort of system failure – and this ought to be studied as Example A of systemic failure – deserves focused review.
“It was going to be the story of the Games,” Bindra said in a telephone interview.
He added, “It’s gut-wrenching, to be very honest. Her situation is really a situation where it’s sometimes you don’t need a gold medal to be a champion in the hearts and minds of the people, and this is that case. The people of India are really looking at this that way.”
All the same, he went on, “From a national perspective, it is – I don’t know if this is the right word – it is a massive, massive setback. There has been a massive push toward sport in India. A lot of good things are happening. It is a massive lesson for the future.”
He also said, “From a national perspective, it is a sad, sad day … she has all my respect as an athlete. I don’t even know what to say.”
Sanjay Singh, who took over last December as the new chief of the Indian Wrestling Federation, called for the national government to “take action against all those responsible,” noting in particular that Phogat had been training with her personal coach, Hungary’s Woller Akos. The Indian government had given the OK for Akos, who has worked with Phogat since 2018, to travel to Paris with her.
“It is not a fault of Vinesh,” Singh told PTI. “She was performing amazingly. The coaches, the support staff, the physios and the nutritionists should take full responsibility.
“They should have paid attention to her all the time to ensure nothing of this sort happens. How this happened and how she went over the weight limit must be looked into.”
UWW rules say wrestlers at the Olympics have to show weight twice:
1/ on the morning of the preliminary rounds, and
2/ the morning of the final.
The prelim weigh-in came Tuesday.
Phogat obviously made that, and went on to wrestle three times through the day, on to – it seemed – Wednesday’s final.
Some history and context.
Phogat comes from a family famous in India for wrestling.
She and her sister, Priyanka, were raised by an uncle, Mahavir Singh Phogat, after their father, Rajpal, died when she, Vinesh, was just 8. The uncle taught wrestling to the two girls alongside his own four daughters; she has said he would wake them up at 4 in the morning to start training; all six cousins have represented India in the sport.
“We used to wonder, ‘Who is this Olympics?’ We just wanted the Olympics to show up fast so that we could get a break from my uncle’s strict training,” she said in a 2020 interview.
The Phogats are the inspiration for the 2016 film Dangal. It turned into one of Bollywood’s biggest-ever hits.
Through her career, Vinesh Phogat has competed in a variety of weight classes. In Rio, the stretcher Olympics, where she finished 10th, she was at 48 kilos. At the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia, she was at 50 kilos, same as here.
In 2019, her focus switched to 53 kilos. At the 2020/1 Games in Tokyo, she took ninth place at 53. She is the 2022 Commonwealth Games gold medalist at 53 and the bronze medalist at the 53 world championships that year.
Her August 2023 knee surgery coincided with the rise of a teen Indian wrestler, Antim Panghal. At the September 2023 women’s worlds, Panghal won bronze in 53, earning a Paris quota spot. Here Wednesday, Pangal, now 19, lost in the first round to Turkey’s Zeynep Yetgil.
Women’s 50 is the lightest class in Olympic wrestling. Phogat, just months after that 2023 ACL surgery, made it through national qualifying.
Here in Paris, after beating Sasaki, Phogat won her quarterfinal match against Ukraine’s Oksana Livach. Then she took out Cuba’s Yusneylis Guzman Lopez.
After winning Tuesday’s semifinal bout against Cuba’s Yusneylis Guzman Lopez // David Ramos / Getty Images
So – three bouts of six minutes each on Day One. Eighteen minutes of combat sports means you have to refuel.
In a statement posted on Twitter/X, the India Olympic Association’s chief medical officer, Dr. Dinshaw Pardiwala, said every wrestler cuts weight to fight in a lower weight category. In Phogat’s case, she would typically compete at 53, with a natural weight of 55 to 56.
When she dipped down still, to 50, that meant getting rid of up to six kilograms, just over 12 pounds, before every competition. After the three Day One fights, and the refueling, she was back up to 52.7 kilograms.
Those 2.7 kilos Phogat now had to drop by Wednesday weigh-in – 5.9 pounds.
The doctor said, “The coach initiated the normal process of weight cut that he has always employed with Vinesh and felt confident that it would be achieved.”
What followed: steam, sauna, making Phogat exercise. Like an all-night Rocky movie or something.
Back to the IOA statement: “All possible drastic measures, including cutting off her hair, were used. However,” come weigh-in, between 7:15 and 7:30 Wednesday morning, “she was not below her allowed weight of 50 kg.”
Pardiwala said, “If we maybe had a few hours more, we could have achieved that 100 grams. But we just didn’t have that time.”
That, though, is like saying that if the men’s 100 meters was maybe 99, Kishane Thompson of Jamaica would have won, not the American Noah Lyles. That’s not how things work.
Once Phogat was disqualified, they had to rehydrate her – which, of course, begs the question of what kind of shape she would have been in 12 hours later for a championship fight – so they took her to a clinic and gave her IV fluids.
Could Phogat have withdrawn, faking injury? No. If she’d sustained an injury everyone saw, she would not have had to appear for Day Two weigh-in. But faking it? By rule, she still would have needed to appear for Day Two weigh-in.
In the championship match, Hildebrandt defeated Cuba’s Guzman. By rule, Phogat was replaced in the gold-medal match by the wrestler who lost to her in the semifinal.
Meanwhile, the unbeatable Sasaki came back through the rounds to defeat Livach Wednesday night, winning bronze, 10-0.
So, the women Phogat beat here will leave Paris with medals.
Guzman’s made for Cuba’s first-ever freestyle Olympic medal. Hildebrandt upgraded from bronze in Tokyo; her Paris victory marks the first time the U.S. won this weight class.
“I can’t believe it,” Hildebrandt could be heard saying on camera before running to family and friends.
“Now you’re Olympic champ!” they told her.
Again and again, she kept saying, “I can’t believe it!”
Earlier, the Indian doctor, Pardiwala, had said of Vinesh Phogat, “Physically and medically, she is OK.
“But of course, undoubtedly, she is disappointed.”
You think? You put in the hard work – and for what?