NEW DELHI, Aug 16: The ace wrestler Vinesh Phogat, the first Indian woman to reach the finals in an Olympic event but was disqualified from any medal for over-weighing by 100 grams, has hinted that she might return to the wrestling mat and continue her fight.
The heart-broken 29-year old Phogat who on the day of her disqualification in the morning of the scheduled final bout on August 7 had announced her retirement in a huff, on Friday said she saw in her the strength for playing till 2032 “because the fight in me and wrestling in me will always be there.”
Vinesh Phogat made history when she reached the final of the 50-kg event at the Paris Olympics 2024. The 29-year-old ace wrestler though was disqualified on the morning of the women’s 50kg freestyle final last week. Her hopes of securing a belated Olympic silver medal were dashed on Wednesday when the ad-hoc division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected Phogat’s appeal against her disqualification from the final.
Woller Akos, Vinesh Phogat’s coach at the Paris Games, took to social media on Thursday to reveal the ordeal the Indian wrestler faced behind the scenes. In a Facebook post in Hungarian, which he later took down, Akos wrote: “After the semi-final, 2.7 kg of excess weight was left; we exercised for one hour and twenty minutes, but 1.5 kg still remained.
“Later, after 50 minutes of sauna, not a drop of sweat appeared on her. There was no choice left, and from midnight to 5:30 in the morning, she worked on different cardio machines and wrestling moves, about three-quarters of an hour at one go, with two-three minutes of rest. Then she started again. She collapsed, but somehow we got her up, and she spent an hour in the sauna. I don’t intentionally write dramatic details, but I only remember thinking that she might die.”
“We had an interesting conversation that night, returning from the hospital. Vinesh Phogat said, ‘Coach, don’t be sad because you told me that if I find myself in any difficult situation and need extra energy, I should think that I beat the best woman wrestler (Japan’s Yui Susaki) in the world. I achieved my goal, I proved that I am one of the best in the world. We have proved that the gameplans work. Medals, podiums are just objects. Performance cannot be taken away’,” Akos added.
“Vinesh had pleaded with Sakshi and Bajrang to not put their hard-earned Olympic medals in the river. She begged them to keep those because they were special. But they explained to her that the journey was important and their performance was not defined by medals,” he wrote.
“We will still be proud of the fact that our professional programme could lead to beating the best woman wrestler in the world and take an Indian woman wrestler to the Olympic final for the first time in history,” he added.
Vinesh Phogat has also finally broken her silence on her heart-breaking disqualification from the women’s 50kg final.
From August 7 till her appeal was rejected on August 15, Vinesh never opened on what she went through after she was disqualified. On Friday, however, Vinesh finally broke her long silence with a three-page post on X.
Vinesh opened up on why the Paris Olympics was a huge occasion for her. “During the wrestlers protest I was fighting hard to protect the sanctity of women in India, the sanctity and values of our lndian flag. But when one looks at the pictures of me with the Indian flag from 28th May 2023, it haunts me. It was my wish to have the Indian flag fly high this Olympics, to have a picture of the Indian flag with me that truly represents it’s value and restores it’s sanctity. I felt that by doing this it will correctly reprimand what the flag went through and what wrestling went through. l really was hoping to show that to my fellow lndians,” Vinesh wrote in a long post.
She added that she and her support staff did not surrender to the circumstances. “There is so much more to say and so much more to tell but words will never be enough and maybe I will speak again when the time feels right. On the night of 6th August and the morning of 7th August, all I want to say is that we did not give up, our efforts did not stop, and we did not surrender but the clock stopped and the time was not fair,” she wrote.
“So was my fate. To my team, my fellow Indians and my family, it feels like the goal that we were working towards and what we had planned to achieve is unfinished, that something might always remain missing, and that things might never be the same again. Maybe under different circumstances, I could see myself playing till 2032, because the fight in me and wrestling in me will always be there. I can’t predict what the future holds for me, and what awaits me in this journey next, but I am sure that I will continue to fight always for what I believe in and for the right thing.”
(Manas Dasgupta)