Decoding the absurd criticism directed at Nikhat Zareen

‘Overhyped’. ‘Not good enough at Olympics level’. ‘Choker’.

From being touted as the next big thing in Indian boxing since Mary Kom, Nikhat Zareen’s fall from grace in the social media universe has been rapid over the last few hours.

Many Indian media publications even dubbed Nikhat’s round of 16 exit at the Paris Olympics as a ‘shocking loss’.

The reason for such an extreme reaction is two-fold.

Firstly, for seasonal fans, Nikhat’s achievements over the last Olympic cycle are irrelevant.

Not just within India, but across the world, the Olympics are an intense but brief period of attention on some names whose legacies are relatively unknown.

The tendency of wildly false narratives, therefore, is common. A case in point are the rampant reels and memes on the Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec, whose two-decade long career has been ignored and replaced by a narrative that he casually took up shooting after a recent divorce.

Incidentally, Nikhat is the only Indian athlete across all sports to have been crowned world champion twice since Tokyo 2020.

Even Neeraj Chopra has just one gold and silver from World Championships in this period.

If indeed Nikhat was ‘overhyped’, she created all the hype by producing results. US-based publication Sports Illustrated had predicted a modest six medals for India at Paris 2024 - one of them being Nikhat’s.

This prediction, however, had been made before the boxing draws had been held.

Which brings us to the second reason for the extreme reaction. A tussle between the world boxing body and the Olympics has currently turned the sometimes-random sport of boxing into a full-scale carnival of randomness, thereby forcing two of the strongest contenders to go up against each other as early as in the round of 16.

Seeding debacle

Nikhat’s face-off with world number 1 Wu Yu was a match worthy of a semifinal at the least, but because of the fight between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Boxing Association (IBA), a new seeding system had to be put in place for Paris 2024.

A seeding system is usually in place with the intention of separating the top-ranked boxers for a balanced competition.

The seedings here did not take any IBA tournament into account, effectively negating Nikhat’s two World Championship golds.

Seedings were instead based on selected continental qualifiers, which meant that Nikhat’s Asian Games split decision semifinal loss took her into the Olympics, but only as an unseeded boxer.

On the other hand, winners of lesser competitions like the Pan American Games, the Oceania Games and the European Games were seeded.

Of the eight seeded boxers in the 50kg category in Paris, four - from Algeria, Brazil, Australia and USA - were defeated in the round of 16. Four seeds made it through, one of whom was tellingly a French boxer who won with a dubious split decision.

Three seeds scraped through without controversy - Wu Yu, Turkey’s Buse Naz Çakıroğlu and Thailand’s Chutamat Raksat, who had been Nikhat’s vanquisher in the Asian Games. Wu Yu and the Turkish boxer have one IBA World Championships gold medal each to show in the last Olympic cycle, compared to Nikhat’s two.

On the basis of results over the last three years, Nikhat is at worst one of the top four boxers in the world in her weight category. But Olympic results, and public memory, will remember Nikhat as a round of 16 finisher.

In an ideal world, the luck of the draw might have made up for the seeding injustice, but it was not to be.

Nikhat got the worst possible opponent in Wu Yu, who she had never met before and whose playing style took her by surprise. Nikhat had been sparring with Çakıroğlu in the lead-up to the Olympics, who is now a prime contender to play Wu Yu in the gold medal match.

No regrets for Nikhat

Nikhat had said before the Games that if she had to face Wu, she would take the first 30 seconds to gauge the Chinese boxer’s game.

On Thursday, it was the first round that was decisive, as Wu kept bobbing her head and ducking out of the Indian’s jabs, connecting on the counter.

Wu took the first round 4-1, and Nikhat kept chasing shadows then onwards.

“She was faster than me,” Nikhat would later admit to reporters.

But she insisted this loss was not a setback.

“I wouldn’t count this Olympics as a disappointment. Unfortunately, I landed a tough draw. And I'm glad that if I lost, I lost to a top seed and the world champion. No regrets. Next Olympics, 2028, nothing is confirmed about boxing, but I will continue to work hard,” she said.

It has been a long fight for the 28-year-old Nikhat to earn her Olympic stage.

With there being a real possibility that boxing will be missing from the Olympics in 2028 for the first time in 112 years, there looms another very real tragic possibility - one of India’s best ever might have had only 18 minutes of spotlight on the ultimate stage.