Irony, Inc
A final, bitter twist to the Vinesh Phogat saga
Just yesterday, a friend and I were discussing the “what next for Vinesh” question. Not another shot at the Olympics, for sure, but perhaps a return to her preferred 53 kg weight category and redemption, of sorts, at the next edition of the World Wrestling Championships scheduled for later this year?
Our conversation was powered by the overwhelming sadness of seeing Vinesh Phogat go down in flames started, and stoked, by others.
“She will quit,” I said at some point. She did — and it is the saddest goodbye in the history of Indian sport, the hardest one to process.
Athletes quitting when they realise they are no longer on top of their game is understandable, no matter how difficult that moment is for a sports fan to process, to internalise (remember when Roger Federer finally quit, in a storm of cheers and tears — not just his own, but also that of his friend and rival Rafael Nadal? Remember how it felt to watch that moment, live?).
But this? Addressing the sport she gave her life to as ‘Ma’, and saying wrestling has won and she has lost? This, just three days — three days that contain an eternity — after she had defeated a champion wrestler who had, till she ran into Vinesh, never tasted defeat in professional competition?
How do you even begin to process that?
THE NDA government is in a tizzy, and so it should be — this fiasco is a direct result of its actions, and inactions, over time. (More on this in a bit).
Without getting into the conspiracy theories doing the rounds, word is that the GoI never expected Vinesh’s disqualification to become an issue with wide-ranging political ramifications. The Opposition walking out of the Lok Sabha was the first indication the government got that this issue could ramify — and with that, the search for an “escape goat” has begun, though it is too early to tell who will be selected as human sacrifice.
The political angle is particularly prevalent in Haryana, where wrestling is intrinsic to the state’s cultural ethos, and where the people take pride in their wrestlers. In a bid to get ahead of any fallout, state chief minister Nayab Singh Saini has announced that his government will confer on Vinesh all the honours and rewards due to a medal-winning athlete.
Is that what Vinesh would want?
Alongside strength, a facet of Vinesh’s character that has shone through during a turbulent year and a half is pride.
Pride in a sport she thinks of as her surrogate mother. Pride in her own prowess. A pride powerful enough to drive her to health-threatening extremes in order to compete, and to win. “Main medal leke hi aungi, dekhna,” she told the media on the eve of her departure for Paris.
Hubristic? Maybe, but equally, indicative of her pride, her self-belief.
What would such a person want — charity, or justice?
WHAT, in her case, is justice? The answer has two parts, and the first of those relates to Paris, and the dramatic events that unfolded there.
Was it fair to deny her a chance to compete, when she weighed 100 grams over the permissible limit on a scale with a 100 gram margin of error? That is a question for experts, and possibly for the Court of Arbitration for Sport to which she has appealed, to answer.
But there is this: On day one of the two-day 50kg wrestling event, Vinesh defeated three opponents, including the hitherto undefeated Yui Susaki, fair and square. Her weight was fine; her wins were clean.
Granting that she couldn’t make the weight to fight the finals, by what logic are those victories taken away from her? Why is she placed last in the event?
For the record, Sarah Ann Hildebrandt of the United States — who has twice faced Vinesh and lost both times — today won gold in the event; the silver went to Cuba’s Guzman Lopez, who lost to Vinesh on day one; Yui Susaki, whose defeat by Vinesh was international headline news for a day, gets a bronze.
“Rules are rules,” United World Wrestling chief Nenad Lalovic insisted while fielding questions about Vinesh’s disqualification. Fair enough, but rules are meant to be backed by application of mind, no? With common sense, with a sense of fairness, of natural justice?
Where is the justice in all of this?
Many international sports stars and commentators have weighed in on Vinesh’s side, and demanded that she be given the silver medal. Of these, Jordan Burroughs is a particularly weighty voice — with one Olympic gold, and three bronzes and six golds at the World Championships, he can speak with authority. And he did, demanding that Vinesh be given silver, and that certain common sense changes be made to the rules.
Without intending to gainsay a medal-festooned superstar of the sport, I wouldn’t even ask for silver for Vinesh — no matter what we think of the rules and their application, they are what they are, and if she doesn’t fight the finals, she doesn’t get the silver. Fair enough.
But by what logic does the UWW deny Vinesh recognition for her fairly-obtained wins? By what logic does an athlete, no matter how storied, who lost in the first round get to walk away with a bronze to her name while Vinesh gets the tag of being last among equals?
IF PARIS is a failure of natural justice, the Indian end of the story is one of systemic abuse.
I was planning to write on this in detail, but then I came across this Shashank Nair story in The Indian Express that does the job, so I’ll bullet-point a timeline of events, drawing partly from my files and partly from Nair’s story (read the full story, though):
Though Vinesh won gold in the 2018 Asiad in the 50kg class, she switched to 53kg for the 2019 World Championships (and won bronze) because maintaining the lower weight was problematic for her. From that point on she decided to compete in the 53 kg class
On 21 January 2023, following a meeting between the protesting wrestlers and then sports minister Anurag Thakur, the ministry asked the WFI to suspend all its activities with immediate effect.
On 24 April the sports ministry stalled scheduled elections to the WFI and formed an ad hoc committee to run the sport. A fresh election date was scheduled, and postponed as the committee grappled with complaints from various state wrestling bodies. Elections scheduled for July 11 was postponed by the Guwahati High Court; the rescheduled elections due on 12 August was postponed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
On 23 August, the UWW suspended the WFI for not conducting elections on time.
Note that during this sorry saga, there was no clarity on who was actually in charge of the sport, and under what rules. Nominally, the ad hoc committee, formed in April and tasked with conducting elections within 40 days, was in de facto charge.
While Vinesh was recuperating from surgery for a damaged ACL, Antim Panghal won bronze at the September 2023 World Championships in the 53 kg class. Under rules framed by the WFI, the Olympics slot in the 53 kg category was awarded to Panghal — meaning that Vinesh Phogat had no chance to make it to Paris at her preferred weight. Note, in this context, that the quota — that is, a place in the Olympic lineup — is usually given to a country. It is incumbent on that country to hold selection trials and pick the athlete who will fill the quota.
Vinesh approached the committee, requesting that there should be selection trials for her weight category so she could get a chance to try and qualify for Paris. The committee promised that trials would be held.
The long-delayed WFI election was finally held on 21 December 2023. Sanjay Singh, a close associate of Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, was elected president. On the same day, Sakshi Malik at a press conference announced that she was quitting the sport, in protest at Sharan Singh’s continued hold on the wrestling body. (Dhabdhaba tha, dhabdhaba rahega, Singh had proclaimed after his crony won the election.) Bajrang Punia returned his Padma Shri a day later.
On 24 December, the Sports Ministry suspended the newly elected WFI till further notice.
On 9 March, the Delhi High Court ordered that the WFI should not conduct selection trials for Paris, and asked the ad hoc committee to supervise the trials.
Trials were held, but not for the 53kg category on the grounds that Antim Panghal had already taken the quota slot. Note that this is the same ad hoc committee that had promised Vinesh that trials would be held for the 53kg category.
At this point, what became clear to Vinesh Phogat was that she would not get to compete in her preferred weight category at the Olympics — and that was when she decided to drop down to the 50kg category. The decision was forced on her, and it was freighted with risk. Her normal body weight is around the 56kg mark (that is not counting what she gained during the surgery and recuperating period), which meant that competing at 53kg would involve dropping three-odd kilos — not a serious problem. To compete at 50kg, however, she would have to drop a whopping six kilos-plus in a hurry — drop it, and keep it off.
On 18 March, in a supremely ironic twist, the sports ministry dissolved the ad hoc committee. The reasons given were (1) the successful completion of selection trials and (2) the UWW’s lifting of the ban on the WFI, since the global body was satisfied that elections had been conducted.
When it comes to Indian sport, there is no shortage of jaw-dropping moments. Here: The Delhi High Court on 2 April, while hearing a petition filed by Bajrang Punia, Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik and others, asked the PT Usha-helmed IOA to file an affidavit indicating the circumstances under which it decided to dissolve the ad-hoc committee. On 9 April, the Delhi High Court asked the sports ministry to respond to a WFI petition challenging its suspension. (Which among other things raises a pertinent question: If the WFI was still under suspension, and if the ad hoc committee had been dissolved, who in all of hell did the sports ministry think was in charge of the sport of wrestling?)
On 16 April, the sports ministry told the Delhi High Court via affidavit that ”it would neither recognise nor provide any support to WFI’s activities”. Any tournaments the WFI organised would not be recognised as official, the ministry said. So if the ad hoc committee is dissolved and the sports ministry won’t recognise and support the WFI, again, who runs wrestling in India today?
Finally, on 26 April, UWW president Nenad Lalovic in a signed letter warned that continued government interference would lead to the global body once again suspending the WFI — and threatened that this time, the suspension would extend to India’s wrestlers as well. This, in the name of upholding the WFI’s “independence and autonomy”. (Wait a minute, though — is the UWW saying that a government that steps in to suspend a badly-mismanaged association is committing a punishable offence? Who died and made Lalovic god?)
Okay, if you have managed to make it through that maze, and have gotten this far: does any of this make sense?
Does any of this remotely resemble a well-run sports body, an ecosystem that can get the best out of our athletes?
If you deliberately set out to plan and execute the complete destruction of a sport, could you do any better than the sports ministry and the IOA?
PostScript: When the gods of sport decide to take a dump on an athlete, or a country, they don’t hold back.
Antim Panghal, who represented India in the 53kg category, had to starve herself for two days to make weight, weakened herself in the process, and lost in the very first round, 0-10, to Zeynep Yetgil of Turkiye.
French police then accused her of smuggling her sister, in her stead, into the Games Village, violating the rules. PTI reports that the IOA has decided to suspend her for three years. (Panghal has since issued a clarification — not that it helps clear up anything except the fact that she did send her sister, under her ID card, to the Village.)
India, note, has sent 144 officials to Paris to manage its contingent of 117 athletes. And that is as good a thought as any to sign off on.
PPS: One of the issues with doing such newsletters is, it takes time to assemble relevant facts, see how they fit into the bigger picture, then write. It takes uninterrupted time — which is a luxury freelancers don’t have. I get mails from my work that I need to attend to; I work from home so there are a hundred interruptions… Typically, what would take me an hour to write sometimes stretches into the entire day, in bits and pieces.
That long-winded explanation just to say, I might end up making mistakes. In this post, there were both errors of syntax, and of fact (typing 58kg when I meant 53kg in one place). I have corrected my errors and am re-updating this; my apologies for the errors in the version that landed in your inbox.
I know neither you nor Sharda Ugra volunteered for this, but for me (and I’m sure many others), you both are the defacto conscience keepers of Indian Sport. More power to you and your pen 🙏🏼
An unbelievable 48-hour spell. The Antim Panghal case from last night was legit a kick in the already hurting teeth. Aside from the access-breach, I hope she isn't made the villain in the Vinesh commentary over the next few weeks.