An errant 100 grams crushed the hopes of a nation and the dreams of a lifetime.
Vinesh Phogat has won before. Vinesh has lost before. Her wins have been glorious and joyful, her defeats have been painful and heartbreaking, and they have always been public.
Her victories, her fights with the system have always been followed by millions. Her lowest moments have also come in front of prying eyes.
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However, her most devastating defeat took place on a weighing scale at 7:30 in the morning in a nondescript room next to a training hall at the Olympic Athletes Village in Paris.
Every morning before they are allowed to wrestle at the Champ-de-Mars, the venue of this year’s wrestling competitions, wrestlers stand in a queue in front of that room. There, overseen by a referee, a doctor and two officials – to make sure they are wearing their wrestling singlet and aren’t standing on tiptoes – they step on a digital weighing scale.
The scale is accurate to 100 grams. It determines if they are allowed to compete on that day.
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All wrestlers compete in weight divisions – six in men’s and women’s freestyle and six in the men’s Greco-Roman wrestling. If they weigh in heavier than the weight class they are entered in, they are not permitted to compete. Their competition ends there.
Vinesh’s competition also did. Weighing for her women’s 50kg final bout, the scale showed 50.10 kg. It is not exactly 100 grams over the limit, but it didn’t matter. Anything in the decimal place over the 50 is a red line.
The rules were clear. Vinesh was disqualified from the Olympics. No defeat will come close to this. This loss didn’t just deny her what could have been but was far more insidious. After promising everything, it left her with nothing.
When she left the wrestling arena in Paris on Tuesday evening, Vinesh had all but secured her spot in history. In what is probably the upset of the Olympic Games, she had beaten the undefeatable Yui Susaki of Japan. Next, she defeated the European champion Oksana Livach and then the Pan American champion Yusnelys Guzman to become the first Indian woman wrestler to reach an Olympic final.
She was going in as the favourite against Sarah Hildebrandt of the USA – whom she had already defeated twice. On the off chance that she was beaten – and Vinesh refuses to believe that it was a possibility – she would at least return with a silver medal.
You can’t take anything for granted in sports and that was true for Vinesh’s team as well. She might have had a battle on her hands on Tuesday evening, but she had another the night before. She needed to ‘make weight’.
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Talk to any wrestler during their career, and especially after it, and they will tell you what they hated the most was the unavoidable weight cut on the night before a competition. ‘Wazan todna’ they call it and that’s exactly what it is –breaking weight.
There’s no way around it. Wrestlers compete in weight divisions. They must prove they weigh in at that division. Since there is an advantage if you are bigger than your rivals, they go to extreme measures to crash diet in the days before their event. Then, after showing that they do belong in the weight category in which they are entered, they rehydrate to regain their physical advantage.
They might look like physical specimens, but the process of cutting weight is downright dangerous. No small number of wrestlers deal with organ damage from dehydration. Diuretics are commonly used.
To combat the health damage caused by weight cuts, the world federation, post the Rio Olympics, split competitions into two-day events – qualification rounds on the first day and finals on the second. Almost immediately, nearly every wrestler moved to a heavier weight category.
Vinesh had competed in the 48kg category at the Rio Olympics. Her weight cuts - which included days where she rationed out a few hundred millilitres of water while training at full tilt - were feats of human endurance and a testament to her sheer will to succeed. She moved to the 50kg category and then when that became hard to manage, she went up to the 53kg category. Even that was hard. Very often, Vinesh would black out in the middle of a match. Her eyes would go dark. She would wrestle on instinct. Sometimes she would even win that way.
For reasons beyond her control, Vinesh had to wrestle in the women’s 50kg category at the Paris Olympics. She wanted to compete in the still manageable 53kg category but a younger rival - Antim Panghal - had claimed that spot. Vinesh desperately asked for trials to determine who would represent India at the Olympics for that weight. This was not some tactic to deny Antim her place at the Games, but just the knowledge of what it would take to weigh in at a lower body weight.
The federation didn’t budge. If she had to go to the Olympics, Vinesh had to wrestle at 50kg or she wouldn’t get to wrestle at all.
She chose to wrestle. Her coaches and support staff weren’t sure. If she ate the equivalent of three square meals for a week, she’d weigh in at 60kg and still look perfectly fit. Some advised her to move up to the 57kg category. But Vinesh was adamant about wrestling at 50kg.
It took a battery of physios, nutritionists and strength and conditioning experts to work this out. These experts - including Wayne Lombard who had worked with India’s Olympic bronze medal-winning hockey team - were some of the best in India if not the world.
They brought Vinesh down to the 50kg category for her first big test at that weight – the Asian Olympic qualifiers. She not only managed to compete but also won the Olympic quota – earning her place at a record third Olympics.
Vinesh competed twice more following her Olympic qualification. These, however, were UWW ranking events, where wrestlers are allowed to compete with a two-kilo weight exemption – Vinesh wasn’t competing at 50kg but at 52kg.
The Olympics was just the second time when she had made that exact 50.00kg mark.
The night before her first day of competition, the procedure was textbook. Military campaigns have been planned out with less precision. Her water intake went down to zero. She worked out on an Exercycle in her sauna suit. When she grew tired, she sat inside a sauna, squeezing out the most adamant drops of water. Then, when her energy returned, she returned to the cycle. It was brutal but it worked.
On the day of the weigh-in, when Vinesh stood on the scales, the numbers read 49.90. Her skin stretched like paper against her muscles, her eyes were sunken, and her veins were arid. She could barely walk but she had earned the right to compete.
She did more than that. The day couldn’t have gone any better. She beat Susaki, Livach and then in the evening, the Cuban Guzman. Rather than soak in the occasion, Vinesh rushed through the mixed zone. She’d speak after the final she said – even while allowing herself a faint smile. Then, a couple of minutes later, she began her weight control regime.
She had one more battle that evening. She was confident of winning this too.
But her team had reasons to worry.
Even as she had been winning, Vinesh’s nutritionist had been nervously monitoring her food and fluid intake.
She had a celebratory glass of juice in the morning right after she had first made weight – 300 grams. She had another couple of litres of fluid to rehydrate herself before her bout - another 2000 grams of body weight gained. A couple of light snacks throughout the day to keep her energy up meant 700 grams more.
By the time Vinesh was done with her day’s competition, she weighed 52.7 kg.
Now, she was in uncharted territory. Because of the dangers intrinsic to the practice of cutting weight to the extremes, it would have been medical malpractice to test out the procedure in training.
She was making weight for a second day in a row. There’s a whole lot of science to weight cutting but luck and guess work also play a role.
As the hours rolled into late night, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. After weeks of dehydration, the body, once it gets rehydrated, simply refuses to give up water. Even urination becomes impossible.
Vinesh didn’t sleep all through last night. She was on the treadmill for six hours and in the sauna for another three. She didn’t consume a bite of food or drink a drop of water. Every few hours, she stood on a weighing scale. The numbers were getting smaller but not fast enough. In desperation, her coaches trimmed the elastic in the bottom of her costume. They thought of chopping her hair and then did it.
But the scale didn’t budge.
Early on Wednesday morning, a staff member of United World Wrestling (UWW) was woken up with a frantic voice on the other end of the line. “What are the rules if an athlete fails to make weight?”
“Disqualification,” came the answer.
At 7:30 am in the morning, there was nothing more that could be done. Observed by a doctor, a referee and two volunteers, Vinesh stood on the scales.
50.1 it read.
A day before, a North Korean wrestler had failed to make the weight in that same hall. He took off his underwear and stood on the scale and was still a few grams overweight. Finally, he stuck a finger into his throat and puked out the last few contents of his stomach next to the weighing station. When Vinesh tried the same, nothing came out. She stood on another scale in the faint hope that there was some error in calibration.
It still read 50.1.
She tried asking for a few minutes more. A few minutes and she would find a way to lose those last wretched 100gms. But just like the scales, the officials refused to budge. Rules are rules, they said.
And just like that, her competition was over. From what is known, Vinesh collapsed in the hall. She was put on a drip to speed up the recovery and when that didn’t work, she was rushed to a hospital.
At the Wrestling Arena, her competitors, coaches and even the UWW president expressed their sympathy, but the sporting machine rolled on relentlessly. Vinesh will now be classified last. Hildebrandt won gold. Cuba’s Guzman won her nation’s first wrestling medal - a silver, while Livach and Susaki wrestled for the bronze. It seems all too bizarre. None of them had managed to beat Vinesh.
In the end, the only one able to beat Vinesh Phogat was Vinesh Phogat.
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