Vinesh Phogat: Perils of a back-page story being pushed to page 1

Opposition MPs protested outside the Parliament over Vinesh Phogat’s disqualification on Wednesday afternoon. There were mentions of a conspiracy and of calls made from within India to sabotage her.

By evening, the farce had extended to candle light marches.

There was a disastrous equation of how the concept of weight is used in combat sports with how it is used by people with weight-loss goals inspired from Instagram reels. Ruling MP Hema Malini said it best, “I hope Vinesh loses that extra 100 gms quickly…though it will be of no use now.”

Amidst this absurd meltdown resulting from a sports story being propelled to national headlines, there were touching messages from fellow athletes, the only ones who can come close to understanding Vinesh’s tragedy - the likes of PV Sindhu and Nikhat Zareen.

Poor sports scribes, taken aback by the deluge of misinformed views, tried their best.

‘It’s lucky for India that our athlete has survived’, a reporter from one of the biggest Indian TV channels chimed in on the sensationalism.

But the public needs someone to blame. For now, most prominently in the dock are unfortunately Vinesh’s support staff, who prepared her when all had seemed lost last year. The chief of the country’s wrestling federation, who one can assume is on Vinesh’s blocked list, has urged the central government to take strict action against them.

Dinshaw Pardiwala, the Indian team’s chief medical officer, had to face cameras to explain how weight categories work and how wrestlers have an ongoing competition with their bodies outside the ring in this sport.

“We cut her hair, shortened her clothes. Did everything medically possible,” he tried to assure.

Wayne Lombard, Vinesh’s strength and conditioning coach and the most eloquent of her support staff members, deluged by messages, asked for time, saying the priority now must be Vinesh’s health.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge,” he posted briefly.

By Thursday morning, Vinesh had announced her retirement, saying she had lost to ‘mother wrestling’.

Vinesh Phogat’s golden run hijacked

Extreme reactions to sports results are not new in India, but this heightened exchange of misinformation is unprecedented because Vinesh had already polarised the nation like few things can.

On Tuesday, even as Vinesh made international wrestling ripples by beating Japan’s undefeated Yui Susaki, that bit of sports news had soon been overtaken by other narratives within the country.

Women took her win as personal victories, left wing pages rushed in to celebrate her, right wing pages saltily insisted that the government had ‘allowed’ Vinesh a chance at the Olympics.

Vinesh’s part in the wrestlers’ protest last year, which put her at the centre of this political divide, had not been against any political party but instead against one sexual abuser within its ranks, but that is a concept that is hard to wrap heads around for many.

Whether the ruling dispensation had been right in shielding their man or whether they should have shielded their star athlete from such a political storm can be up for debate, but not one sports scribes can have much of a say in.

Failed weigh-ins a known risk in wrestling

Vinesh’s disqualification was a heartbreak, one of the most devastating in Indian sports history - make no mistake - but religious sports fans and those who travel miles to cover sports have endured so much already that this too will pass.

The nature of sports is such that narrow margins cause defeats - and consequently heartbreaks, even though they are usually away from the national spotlight tucked away in the back pages. Sometimes, these narrow margins are not in the public arena, but rather in the training room.

Each Olympic sport has its exclusive physical needs.

A shooter can win medals with one hand in pocket. On the other hand, a wrestler’s body is always in tournament mode; because in combat sports, even in a moment of triumph, tragedy is lurking just around the corner on the weighing scale.

Ask Pappu Yadav, the Indian wrestler who had failed his weigh-in at the 1996 Olympics.

“The weigh-in was 70 km away from the Games village in America and all officials were at the opening ceremony that day. Having a coach would’ve helped, but I was denied that also, so I couldn’t make my weight,” he had told The Indian Express many years ago.

Forget social media outrage and shrill TV anchors crusading for you on prime time television, Yadav did not even have support from Indian officials.

In international wrestling history, the most famous failed weigh-in of recent times was of USA’s gold medal favourite Daniel Cormier in 2008.

Among other famous instances, boxer Mary Kom had struggled with her weight during her historic run at the 2012 Olympics, but the fact that she had managed it successfully had not made the news.

Vinesh herself has been disqualified in the past for not making the weight cut in time.

Tokyo Olympics 4th-place finisher Deepak Punia missed a weigh-in for an Olympic qualifier in April this year.

Failed weigh-ins are a usual risk in this sport, though none have been as high-profile as Vinesh’s Olympic tragedy.

Shrill TV anchors have been saying that such a thing has never happened before in a medal match at the Olympics. That is true, but only because wrestling bouts used to be held in a single day before Tokyo 2020. Cutting weight for the second day is obviously more difficult than the first day because of the constraint of time.

100 grams away from the greatest Indian sports story

The tragedy for sports scribes is that what was so close to being the greatest Indian sports story ever written has had to turn into a fight against disingenuous news in the space of a few hours, where sensations on the mat were trumped by the sensational reactions to it.

Vinesh, who fought three of the best bouts of her life on Tuesday, weighed above 52 kgs - her normal body weight - after the first weigh-in - where she weighed 49.9 kg - because she had to gather strength for them.

And what strength she did gather!

Her victory over Susaki is a match that should be replayed in schools, in homes and coaching academies for generations to come, but sadly that will remain a back-page story.

She had to fit in some sort of sleep schedule on Tuesday night because contrary to evidence, she is a human being.

She started trying to lose weight from 5 am to make it in time for Wednesday’s weigh-in. At 8:30 am, she was found to be 100 grams over 50 kgs.

She had been pushed to the limit of human endurance, but perhaps even an hour more would have allowed one final push at shedding those hundred grams.

If international wrestling rules do change as a result of this incident, it will be a major landmark in the sport’s history.

There has been an ongoing social media campaign to amend the rules such that Vinesh is given a silver medal, with participation of some North America-based wrestlers, but it is hard to say whether they are on board with the campaign because of the injustice of the sport or for the traction Indian internet users give them.

But it is unlikely that the rule would be changed because the wrestling world body made the change in the first place with the intention of encouraging wrestlers to compete in their natural weight categories.

In Indian wrestling, this would be an anomaly.

Most make the drastic weight cuts on the eve of their bout to fit into lower categories in order to increase their competitive levels. But this has been the usual nature of what top athletes from India have had to put their bodies through to make a mark at the Olympics.

Think of gymnast Dipa Karmakar, who had to attempt a potentially fatal technique at the 2016 Olympics so that her high difficulty score could make up for the low execution score. 

For Indians, the figurative difficulty score in all sports is always very high. 

For now, all we can say is that sports is infinitely cruel. For someone not used to its cruelties, getting on the bus once in four years can be a brain-frying experience.