By the time the Rio Games came around, Vinesh was one of the favourites to land a medal for India, and with good reason.
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Despite having a vast population, India has not had a record in the Olympics to boast of. Individual successes have been few and far between. The last time an Indian athlete won a Gold medal at The Games was shooter Abhinav Bindra back at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Times have changed since then and Indian athletes have become more accustomed to performing in high-pressure situations ever since. The 2016 Rio Olympics, in particular, was one everyone looked forward to, especially one Vinesh Phogat.
Vinesh is a wrestling prodigy, a natural at the sport. The Phogat family has always housed incredibly talented wrestlers and Vinesh had undoubtedly inherited the genes. However, not always did people want to get behind her dreams. She was a woman in Haryana, a state in northern India where gender inequality runs rampant even today. Apart from that, Vinesh was always living in the shadows of her two Commonwealth Games champion cousins, Geeta and Babita. It was crucial for her to put up a monumental performance in Rio to finally climb out of their shadows.
By the time the Rio Games came around, Vinesh was one of the favorites to land a medal for India, and with good reason. She had bagged a then 52 kg bronze medal at the 2013 Asian Wrestling Championships, followed by Gold at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. In 2016, she was presented with the Arjuna award for her sporting accolades.
She was definitely one of the favorites heading into the Rio Games in 2016. In the opening round of the competition at Rio, Phogat displayed exactly how good she was. She moved through to the next round with relative ease, tossing her opponent aside. By the time the quarter-finals came around, Phogat was on course to making history for India.
However, it was in the quarter-finals that her dreams had to be momentarily cut short. Phogat suffered a serious injury during her match against China’s Yanan Sun and had to be stretchered out. She had suffered a posterolateral ligament complex tear in her knee. As she was being taken out of the arena, Phogat had tears running down her face. The referee had risen Sun’s hand as the default victor of the tie.
The following years saw an even more motivated Phogat. She became the first female Indian wrestler to win a Gold medal at the 2018 Asian Games, before making her presence felt in the United World Wrestling Yasar Dogu International and Poland Open events in 2019.
This time around, Phogat is more confident, a seasoned veteran of the sport, and once again a favourite to bag a medal. “Now the focus is to work on mistakes and areas of concern, get back to training quickly for the next year when the Tokyo Games start,” she had said in an earlier interview.
