In 50 days from now, Vinesh Phogat will have the chance to make herself India's greatest-ever wrestler, both on and off the mat. The road that's taken her this far, though, has probably been the toughest any compatriot has taken to Paris Olympics.
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On August 13, Vinesh Phogat injured the ACL on her left knee during a training session. It was a serious injury and, four days later, she underwent surgery on the knee. She spent the next few months in rehab, re-learning how to walk, then in basic training, slowly moving on to full-scale training. All the while in various degrees of pain and discomfort.
Vinesh, 29, already spent the first half of 2023 fighting against the then head of the Wrestling Federation of India Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, whom she and others had accused of sexual assault. She'd slept on the pavement, faced extreme levels of online trolling, and been repeatedly let down by those holding various offices of power in government and outside. But she had soldiered on, fuelled by the desire for a berth at the Paris Olympics, and a chance to win that elusive medal. And, as important, fuelled by a sense of grave injustice.
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There was one more unforeseen hurdle, though, in February: The Olympic quota for her weight category (53kg) had already been claimed in September by her younger rival, Antim Panghal. She now had to decide whether to risk challenging Antim for that quota -- whether the challenge would even be allowed was not certain -- or to shift, at this late hour, to another weight category. That was potentially the more risky option, given the fine margins at the highest level of competition.
For Vinesh the choice was clear. And so began a journey of pain and hope.
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Vinesh is no stranger to pain, hurt and conflict. That's actually been the story of her career. Her first shot at an Olympic medal, in 2016, ended in injury and tears on the mat at Rio -- she had to be carried off, so bad was the knee injury. She went to Tokyo in 2021 as the world no. 1 but lost in an upset in the quarter-final.
Her troubles didn't end there; right after her defeat, she was temporarily suspended by the WFI on grounds of indiscipline. The reasons: she did not wear the official team singlet, she did not stay at the Games Village with the rest of the team and she did not train with them. The WFI later let her off with a reprimand and the threat of a lifetime ban for a repeat offence.
A few days later, in an emotional piece in The Indian Express, Vinesh revealed how the episode had bruised her emotionally as well as physically: "I don't know when I will return (to the mat). Maybe I won't. I feel I was better off with that broken leg. I had something to correct. Now my body is not broken, but I'm truly broken."
She bounced back in 2022 with a gold at the Commonwealth Games and a bronze at the World Championships. But then came 2023, the year when everything changed.
In January 2023, Vinesh, along with Bajrang Punia and Sakshi Malik, took to New Delhi's Jantar Mantar to protest against the WFI and Singh. Vinesh publicly spoke about the alleged sexual misconduct and accused Singh of sexually exploiting minor wrestlers. When that was met with a muted response from the Sports Ministry and Indian Olympic Association, Vinesh and co. returned to Jantar Mantar in April and remained there for the next 40 days.
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They slept on the pavement, in full public view, braving searing heat and torrential rains, assaults by the police and the threat of more grievous physical violence by their opponents. Such was the apathy from all corners that Vinesh returned her Khel Ratna award and almost threw her medals into the Ganga at Haridwar in protest.
Wrestling, understandably, took a backseat throughout this phase. Vinesh, by her own admission, thought her career was done. When she finally managed to get herself physically and mentally ready to return to the mat for the Asian Games, she was accused of misusing her seniority status as the protesting wrestlers were given one-bout trials by the IOA-appointed ad-hoc panel. The very junior wrestlers who idolised Vinesh were now openly criticizing her.
Then came the knee injury and the resultant surgery.
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A few weeks later, South African strength and conditioning specialist Dr. Wayne Lombard got a call from Vinesh. They'd worked together after the Rio Olympics, when he helped her get back to the mat after surgery on her right knee. When he heard about the injury, he says, the first thing he did was pray that it "wasn't the same knee."
It wasn't, but that was the only consolation. An ACL injury is considered among the toughest injuries an athlete can sustain; it puts your knee out of operation and severely restricts your day-to-day movements, let alone training. The athlete must learn to walk again and then, crucially, gather the confidence to put weight on their injured leg; it takes anywhere between six months to a year to fully recover and get back to competitive sport.
Lombard, who came to India in early November, didn't have that much time. He had a more immediate target: get Vinesh ready to fight on the mat in three months, at the national championships in February. The first hurdle was that, from a medical perspective, Vinesh was supposed to run only in late December and get onto a wrestling mat a month later.
He felt Vinesh's recovery could be fast-tracked since he knew how her body responded to load management. "We were quite aggressive in our approach," he says, "but didn't cut any corners. We were also able to tick every threshold box that we would need to take in a normal ACL protocol."
He had Vinesh run on an anti-gravity treadmill, which takes the load off the joints, to introduce her to running patterns a little bit quicker and speeded her route to normal running. They also worked on some jumping-type movement patterns to restore the neuromuscular patterns.
But the ace up his sleeve was something more familiar: they brought a wrestling mat to the training arena early on in the rehab. "Once she saw the mat, she wanted to get onto it as quickly as possible," he told ESPN.
"We designed conditioning sessions on the mat where she wore her wrestling shoes. That way, we brought her back to an environment that she really liked and felt comfortable in. For her, it was like 'I'm in the gym, I'm doing my rehab, but I'm actually on the mat now.'"
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It worked. Vinesh made a full comeback at the nationals in February and won gold in the 55kg division. It was an encouraging sign but now there was a big question to deal with: what category would Vinesh wrestle in the Olympics?
Antim had already won the Olympic quota in the 53kg -- Vinesh's preferred category -- and Vinesh had three options: move up to the 57kg category, but that would mean she'd face physically stronger wrestlers; hope the WFI conducted a trial before the Olympics and beat Antim there to win the 53kg quota -- but there was no guarantee of a trial; or take the drastic step and move down to the 50kg weight class.
The last of those options was the toughest and most concerning, both from a physical and mental perspective. And that's the one she chose.
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Her decision surprised her team and her closest friends.
"We were at my house in New Delhi and discussing the weight category issue, what the way forward could be," says Sakshi. "I asked her if she would compete in 57kg, but she immediately said, 'Nahi, main toh 50kgs mein ladungi. (I'll fight in the 50kg category).' I was shocked and asked her if she was serious about cutting down all the way to 50kgs but she was firm about her decision. I knew at that very point that the hunger in her to win the Olympic medal was very much alive."
"I was looking at her like, are you crazy?" says Viren Rasquinha, managing director and CEO of Olympic Gold Quest, who have been supporting Vinesh since 2017. "And she said it in a very matter-of-fact way. The thing about Vinesh is when she sets her mind to do something, she will do it."
Lombard, who was appointed by OGQ to work with Vinesh, was just as surprised. "But as support staff, we can give our ideas and concerns regarding certain decisions that the athlete makes. But in the end, if the athlete is determined that that is the way to go, it's our job to find the best way to support that decision and ensure her body is ready."
Her body was ready, but there was one twist remaining, and it came at the trials in March to decide the Indian team that would wrestle for the Olympic quotas at the Asian qualifiers and subsequent World qualifiers. Vinesh wanted to compete in both the 50 and 53kg categories and sought assurance from those running the WFI that she would be allowed a final trial in the 53kg [in which Antim already won the Olympic quota] before the Olympics if she won the trial. After a long wait, she got the nod and competed in both categories.
So here was this wrestler, making her full comeback after nearly 18 months and surgery, competing in not one, but two weight categories, just to ensure she had a shot at an Olympic quota. Vinesh had to shed from 60kg to make the weight for the 50kg category and yet recover in time to fight, in that depleted state, against wrestlers in the 53kg as well.
"There's always going to be a risk," says Lombard, "even if she wasn't weight cutting, even if she was at 57kgs, there's always going to be a risk of re-injury. But Vinesh is mentally ridiculously strong."
You might wonder, what's the big deal over losing weight -- people do it all the time, even if it's nine kg. Few of us, though, are elite athletes.
"The weight cut takes a massive toll [nuksaan] and I say this from experience," says Sakshi. She was speaking specifically about the standard and accepted practice of all wrestlers to undergo special diets, even stay off food altogether, immediately before their bouts to bring their weight down a couple of kilos from training levels to the upper limit in the category.
"The entire process is so difficult, and we are so dehydrated that we barely recover in time for our bouts. You can call this a majboori for us wrestlers," Sakshi said.
She recalls what happened in Rio. "I still remember to this day, Vinesh drank a maximum of 200ml of water, for three days, when she was competing in the 48kg division at Rio. No sugar, no salt, no food. She survived with just water for three days. Despite being so depleted, we still had to train to cut weight. I remember we would go to the food hall at the Games Village and have a swab of Nutella for some sugar and a quick energy boost. We did not have a spoon of Nutella, we would literally just swab a bit on our finger and head to training."
Eight years later, the risks have multiplied, and the process just become that much more difficult (and more so for female athletes). "Age plays a major role in your ability to cut weight," Sakshi explains. "The risk of injury is very high now and as you would have seen even during the nationals, she had taped both her knees to prevent injury. You need to fight with double focus and double protection at this stage to reduce the scope of injury. Our sport is anyway prone to injury and a weight cut largely increases that risk."
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Dr. Anand Dubey, who was Bajrang's physiotherapist until recently and is now with the Indian tennis team, believes the major weight loss won't impact Vinesh much. "Considering Vinesh has cut down to 50kgs over five months, it won't have a big impact on her strength. If you cut weight suddenly, then you become more prone to injury. However, as Vinesh has, if you cut the weight gradually in a controlled manner, the body adapts to it."
Vinesh seemed to have adapted fast enough: She won the 50kg trials, went to Bishkek a month later for the Asian qualifiers, and took less than four minutes across three bouts to claim that Olympic quota. She would do all of that while having drank hardly a litre of water across 18 hours of training over the three previous days, to make weight.
After she'd won the quota, Vinesh told the United World Wrestling website about how she was advised to not make that big switch because she was returning to the mat after nearly one and a half years, that too on the back of an injury, which she risked re-injuring. "But I did not have any option. It was a do-or-die situation. I chose the die option," said Vinesh.
"Vinesh is one of the very few athletes who could have pulled this off," says Sakshi in deep admiration. The two have a bond that goes back to their early days as wrestlers, and they grew even closer while rooming together at the Rio Olympics. "The pain of missing out at Rio and Tokyo...she still has that hunger for an Olympic medal. I haven't seen the kind of hunger Vinesh has in any other athlete. The weight cut was definitely hard, but her chances of a medal seem brighter in the 50kg."
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Vinesh is no stranger to the 50kg category: she enjoyed one of her career's most successful years in that division in 2018 when she won golds at the Asian Games and Commonwealth Games and silver at the Asian Championships. Her record that year -- the only year she competed in the 50kg for an entire season -- read 10:1; just one loss across 11 bouts.
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Her return to the 50kg in 2024 has been encouraging; she's unbeaten across seven bouts, but against distinctly inferior competition. Nonetheless, her four wins at the Nationals in Patiala in March were all convincing -- and more admirable given that she was competing in two weight categories after an arduous weight cut.
What will give her confidence is how she decimated her opponents at the Asian Olympic qualifiers, her first international competition in 16 months. She needed all of 98 seconds to beat South Korea's Cheon Miran, a bronze medallist at the 2023 Senior Asian Championships and a little over a minute to pin Cambodia's Samnang Dit before easing her way past Laura Ganikyzy, a former U23 Asian Championships bronze medallist.
The Paris Olympics, though, will be a different beast. The field includes defending Olympic champion and four-time world champion Yui Susaki, four-time Olympic medallist Mariya Stadnik, Tokyo bronze medallist Sarah Hildebrandt and two-time World's silver medallist Dolgorjavyn Otgonjargal.
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Susaki is a force to reckon with -- she has only lost three bouts in her career and all of them were at the hands of compatriot Yuki Irie. (Fun fact: Vinesh had beaten Irie twice in 2018, at the Asian Games and Asian Championships.)
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And so, over to Vinesh to do what she does best. Age is not on her side, nor is her weight, and nor is her experience in this division. But back against the wall, fighting with everything at stake, who would bet against her?
She's fought the system, which few Indian athletes have, and won -- fewer still in that category. She has lost plenty, too: people she thought were her friends, time spent with family, a year of her wrestling career and her faith in the system. She can, in the space of a couple of days and a handful of bouts, erase all of that.
17th Aug 2023 - ACL Surgery
6 months of painful rehab
11th Mar 2024 - Won 50 kgs Wrestling trials after a massive weight cut
20th April 2024 - Wins the Olympic Quota. Qualifies for her 3rd Olympics
Been to hell & back last 2 years.
Vinesh Phogat - 29 yrs. What an athlete! pic.twitter.com/h85yYNzexI
- Viren Rasquinha (@virenrasquinha) April 20, 2024
As Rasquinha says, "In Olympic sports and in a sport like wrestling, unless you're mad, you can't win medals. You have to be obsessed. Passion is not enough. This lady is something else, I've never seen an athlete like her. There are very few talents in the world like Vinesh Phogat."
Rasquinha has assembled a crack 11-person team around Vinesh including Lombard, coach Woller Akos, her surgeon, a strength and conditioning coach, a physio, nutritionist, psychologist, manager and three sparring partners. At the centre of it all is this unstoppable force, fuelled by the desire to win that one medal that will give her legendary status.
"The only thing I have told Bajrang and Sakshi is that I will still fight," Vinesh told ESPN in December. "I will look him [Brij Bhushan] in the eye and medal leke aungi main, tu dekh [bring back a medal and show it to him]. I have a reason to fight. If I train well, I can win a medal. No one can stop me."