Vinesh’s legacy stands irrespective of any medal

Vinesh Phogat – lying on the street, face-down, shielding her cousin Sangeeta Phogat from cops, holding on to the national flag. An image from May 2023 that has lodged itself in our minds. One that defined courage outside the field of play, and speaking truth to power. A rarity among elite Indian athletes. Vinesh slept on the pavement for days together and was roughed up by cops and dragged through the streets.
Then there’s the image we have of her from Paris, three days ago. Her kneeling on the mat, pointing her index finger heavenwards wearing a smile, perhaps telling herself that there’s divine justice afterall. She’d gone where no Indian female wrestler had gone before – an Olympic final.
To get there she did the unthinkable in the opening round – defeated Olympic gold medallist and four-time world champion, the seemingly invincible Yui Susaki who had never before been beaten by a wrestler outside Japan.
After her semifinal bout, Vinesh was seen getting on a video call with her mother back home. “Gold lana hai” (I have to bring gold) , she said, raising a clenched fist.
The next morning, her world came crashing down. Despite her best efforts, a stubborn 100 grams still remained above the permissible 50 kg. She was disqualified. It meant she could neither fight the final bout nor be eligible for the silver medal she confirmed the previous night. The UWW rules were clear, even if not the most logical.
Later that night, she filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport against her disqualification and requested that she be awarded the silver medal. On Thursday, the 29 year-old announced her retirement.
‘Wrestling has won against me, I have lost…Forgive me..your dreams, my courage, everything is broken and I don’t have the strength in me anymore..Goodbye wrestling 2001-2024. I will forever be indebted to all of you..Sorry.” read her note on X.
She’s had the worst luck at the Olympics. She’s also competed in three different weight categories in all three outings – 48kg, 53kg and 50 kg. At the 2016 Games, an inconsolable Vinesh had to be stretchered out after she suffered a knee injury during her quarterfinal bout. In Tokyo, she went in as top seed in her weight class but couldn’t progress to the medal round. In Paris, she was on the threshold of history and her first Olympic medal, only to be undone by a wretched 100 grams.
Growing up, Vinesh had a difficult life. Her mother was widowed when she was 32, and she’s seen the struggles and the steel of a young woman, up against patriarchy and the world. It’s that fight that she doesn’t want to let up on.
Traditionally in northern India, akhadas were the domain of men. Wrestling is an almost primordial form of contact sport. It’s just two people in singlets taking on each other with nothing but bare hands.
It was Chandgi Ram – a wrestler with considerable success in the national scene from Sisai, a village in Hisar, Haryana, who kicked down some of those doors.
Ram won the 1970 Asian Games heavyweight title and made his Olympic appearance two years later. Soon after he retired from the sport, he turned coach and set up his own akhada. When it was announced that women’s wrestling would be part of the Olympic program from the 2004 Athens Games, he got two of his daughters – Deepika and Sonika (who later became India’s first woman wrestler), to pick up the sport. Since there were no dangals open to women then, he organized bouts between his daughters out of his own pocket.
Within the wrestling community, however, there were influential dissenters who believed that women had no business being in the sport.
In Rudraneil Sengupta’s brilliant 2016 book Enter the Dangal, Deepika narrates the time the campaign against women’s wrestling reached her father’s akhada. The year was 2000. “Stones being thrown from everywhere, papa running, blood flowing down his head, mummy running, the electricity lines cut off. I was told to take all the kids and lock myself up in the inside room. People hammered on the doors. I could hear papa screaming ‘Deepika pahalwan, don’t open the door!’ I could see one of papa’s coaches lying on the floor with his legs broken.”
Ram refused to budge.
His loyalists carried the torch forward. One of them was Mahavir Phogat.
Phogat trained his daughters – Geeta, Babita, Sangeeta and Ritu as well as his niece, Vinesh, in the sport. Geeta became India’s first female wrestler to win a Commonwealth gold medal in 2010. Celebrations in their village, Balali in Haryana reportedly lasted ten days.
Vinesh went on to become the first female wrestler to win an Asian Games gold and has the most number of World Championships medals – three – by an Indian female wrestler.
Her public protests against former Wrestling Federation of India chief Brijbhushan Sharan Singh’s alleged sexual harassment of female wrestlers, alongside Olympic medallists Bajrang Punia and Saakshi Malik, circled back to women’s right to enter akhadas, training halls, camps and competitions. This time, it was about being able to do so without being groped, harassed, or preyed upon by powerful men in the sport.
“Not all victories look alike. Some end up as a glittering souvenir in a cabinet but the ones that matter more find their way into the stories we tell our children..,” India’s first individual Olympic medallist Abhinav Bindra put it succinctly.
Vinesh’s legacy stands irrespective of any medal. She wrote her indelible legacy the day she lent her voice and limbs to taking on the system and fighting for women who’ve been wronged. No power can rob her of it.