Good Sport: Why Vinesh should be feted
Vinesh Phogat was not a winner at the Paris Olympics, yet her stirring story has caused her to be lionised after her return to the country — strange fetishisation of failure, cynics would say. Yet, 21 years of wrestling — the injuries and the pain, the wagging tongue of villagers, the blood, sweat and tears — cannot and must not be distilled into a single label denoting failure at the greatest stage in the world. Vinesh is a multiple World Championships medallist, and has won countless medals in other international events. She’s not a failure by any stretch of imagination.
Vinesh didn’t deserve a medal in Paris; she’d reached the final of the women’s 50kg freestyle wrestling before being disqualified for being overweight the day she was to fight for gold. She was 100 grams overweight — someone in her team of coaches, physio, trainer and nutritionist made a horrible miscalculation and she couldn’t make the 50kg grade on Day 2 of competition. They didn’t figure out how much weight Vinesh could lose by sweating in the cooler nights of Paris. Vinesh herself knows the rules — she will never say that she was robbed of a medal. Her supporters think she was wronged and that’s why they turned up in huge numbers after she landed in New Delhi — she was honoured in more than 100 places during her travel to her village, Balali. Local politics was a factor behind this — Haryana is going to the polls in October, after all.
But the real reason Vinesh should have been feted and honoured and celebrated as an icon is that she’s spoken against sexual harassment in sport; she’s dared to name her alleged tormentor, former Wrestling Federation of Indian president and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. The law is taking its own course now, after the Delhi Police’s unhurried action in the matter, and Vinesh is determined to see the matter to its logical conclusion. Her peerlessness as a wrestler has not been in doubt for a decade; it’s her crusade for justice against powerful men in positions of power that makes her even more important as a role model in the present times, when the Kolkata rape-murder of a young doctor has touched a raw nerve.
Lesson well learnt
Neeraj Chopra, winner of a silver at the Paris Olympics, didn’t come to India to be lionised — perhaps he remembered the lessons of 2021 when, after winning a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, he had to attend hundreds of felicitation events. He’d put on weight and had to end his competition season early. He’s not making the mistake again. Less than a fortnight after he won a silver medal in Paris, Chopra finished second at the Lausanne Diamond League, with a best of 89.49 metres. As in Paris, he was second to a man who crossed 90 metres — Grenada’s Anderson Peters (90.61m). The mark of 90 metres has become a millstone around the neck of Chopra, who had thrown 89.45m to win silver in Paris. He’s never touched 90 metres in competition, and the wait has become excruciating; in Paris, there were four others who had gone that distance in the past. After Arshad Nadeem went past 92 metres with his second throw, at least three throwers knew that they could do that, too, for they actually had done that in the past.
Chopra had not done it, but he said he was confident he could do it, too; that might appear to be bravado, but that’s also the way champions think and are encouraged to think — that there’s nothing they cannot achieve. Chopra is quite a unique blessing to Indian sport — most of our previous Olympics successes came in events that are weight-controlled (wrestling, boxing) or shooting, which involves using a weapon. Chopra is a world-class sportsperson in a sport that needs extreme levels of athleticism, strength and technique.
Despite two Olympics medals, it does seem that Chopra’s best throws could lie in the future — he says he knows it. He says he needs to decide when to undergo surgery to get rid of a persistent groin injury. Chopra is only 26, and throwers are believed to peak in strength and technique in their 30s. Chopra does have time to go past 90.
