Heavy loss: Vinesh Phogat gets disqualified from women’s 50kg wrestling final

For Vinesh Phogat, the Olympics are cursed. In 2016, she got badly injured in the quarterfinal and crashed out. Five years later in Tokyo, a neurological ailment caused by excessive and sudden weight cut left her dazed on the mat and she exited in the second round. On Wednesday in Paris, just when she was on the brink of her Olympic redemption, the curse struck again to take away her confirmed medal as she failed to meet the weight requirement for her women’s 50kg wrestling gold medal bout by 100g. The disqualification sent shockwaves across the Indian contingent in Paris.

Current rules of the United World Wrestling (UWW) mandates weighins on both days of the competition. Phogat weighed 49.9kgs on Day 1 to be allowed to compete and when she won three bouts, including against Japan’s Yui Susaki. On day two, however, she was found 100g overweight and was disqualified.

Weight management is crucial to wrestling. Almost all wrestlers add weight before the competition and then bring it down in the run-up to a major tournament. The reduction in most cases is up to 10 per cent of their body weight and it is done in about two weeks. Then, in the last 24 hours, they hardly eat or drink anything to bring down the weight to the permissible limit. It is extremely tough on the body but that’s how it is.


After the weigh-in, the wrestlers are given a recovery meal for they need hydration and energy to fight. This meal and fluids, which are given to the athlete all through the day are well calibrated and add to the body weight .

Normally, the support team knows how much it can add up to and prepare the weight reduction strategy accordingly.

In Phogat’s case, her team had expected about a 1.5kg increase to her body weight. When she checked her weight after the semi-final win, she was found to be 2.7kg overweight, 1.2kg more than expected.

That’s when the penny dropped on the Indians. Between 8pm Paris time on Tuesday and 7:15am Paris time on Wednesday, the weigh-in time on Day 2, everything was tried to get her weight back to 50kg. They tried Sauna, sweat therapy, skipping, running and every other technique possible.

At about 3:30am in the morning, for the first time it seemed to the Indian contingent that things were going out of hand. Vinesh had also started to worry and told her team to shave off her hair if need be. Finally, around 6:30am it felt like they had managed it and decided to leave for the weigh-in. Sadly for India and Vinesh, she was found to be 100g overweight.

Now, was there a conspiracy? Or was it a case of inefficiency on the part of the support team? Or was it beyond anyone’s control? There are no definitive answers to these questions. One can blame it on the sports science team for failing to calculate properly. Hopefully, these questions will be answered going forward.

But then it could also be a case of “rebound weight gain”, as India’s Chief Medical Officer at the Paris Olympics, Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala put it, where the body gains additional weight as a natural response to recover from sudden loss of weight. This is difficult to predict with full accuracy.

Whatever be the case, the trauma is humungous. It will take a long time for Vinesh to come out of this. It is extremely important for the country as a whole to support the athlete at these times.

“You don’t always need a medal round your neck to be labelled a champion,” Abhinav Bindra said.

And Vinesh is a champion, medal or not.