Vinesh Phogat landed at the IGI airport in Delhi on Saturday morning to a rousing reception. So what, she didn’t get the Olympic medal she richly deserved? So what she had gone through a nightmarish last few days in Paris? The ones that gathered, which included an illustrious list of Olympic medalists, Bajrang Punia, Sakshi Malik and Vijender Singh, made her feel like the champion she is.
Vinesh was carrying the burden of losing out on a medal after being disqualified from the women’s 50kg wrestling hours before her gold medal bout for being 100 grams overweight for far too long. And it all rolled down her cheeks the moment she got the reception from her supporters.
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.”.
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