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Ahead of her women’s 50 kg freestyle final, grappler Vinesh Phogat was disqualified from the Paris Olympics after being found overweight (Getty Images)
Woller Akos, Vinesh Phogat’s coach at the Paris Games, took to social media to reveal the ordeal the Indian wrestler faced behind the scenes.
Vinesh Phogat made history when she reached the final of the 50-kg event at the Paris Olympics 2024. The 29-year-old ace wrestler though was disqualified on the morning of the women’s 50kg freestyle final last week.
Her hopes of securing a belated Olympic silver medal were dashed on Wednesday when the ad-hoc division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) rejected Phogat’s appeal against her disqualification from the final.
Woller Akos, Vinesh Phogat’s coach at the Paris Games, took to social media on Thursday to reveal the ordeal the Indian wrestler faced behind the scenes. In a Facebook post in Hungarian, which he later took down, Akos wrote: “After the semi-final, 2.7 kg of excess weight was left; we exercised for one hour and twenty minutes, but 1.5 kg still remained. Later, after 50 minutes of sauna, not a drop of sweat appeared on her. There was no choice left, and from midnight to 5:30 in the morning, she worked on different cardio machines and wrestling moves, about three-quarters of an hour at one go, with two-three minutes of rest. Then she started again. She collapsed, but somehow we got her up, and she spent an hour in the sauna. I don’t intentionally write dramatic details, but I only remember thinking that she might die.”.
“We had an interesting conversation that night, returning from the hospital. Vinesh Phogat said, ‘Coach, don’t be sad because you told me that if I find myself in any difficult situation and need extra energy, I should think that I beat the best woman wrestler (Japan’s Yui Susaki) in the world. I achieved my goal, I proved that I am one of the best in the world. We have proved that the gameplans work. Medals, podiums are just objects. Performance cannot be taken away’,” Akos added.
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“Vinesh had pleaded with Sakshi and Bajrang to not put their hard-earned Olympic medals in the river. She begged them to keep those because they were special. But they explained to her that the journey was important and their performance was not defined by medals,” he wrote, according to The Indian Express.
“We will still be proud of the fact that our professional programme could lead to beating the best woman wrestler in the world and take an Indian woman wrestler to the Olympic final for the first time in history,” he added.
