Vinesh Phogat’s coach at the Paris Games, Woller Akos, has said he feared that the wrestler “might die” by the end of the five-and-a-half hours of intense weight-cut the night before the Olympic final.
Facing criticism after Vinesh Phogat was disqualified from the 50-kg final for being 100g overweight, the Hungarian, in a social media post on Thursday, said the team did everything possible before the second-day weigh-in so that the wrestler could take the mat for the gold-medal bout.
In a Facebook post in Hungarian, which he later took down, Akos highlighted Vinesh Phogat’s commitment to secure her first Olympic medal. “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,” Akos wrote.
Vinesh Phogat of India reacts after winning the 50kg women’s wrestling semi-final match against Yusneylis Guzman Lopez of Cuba at the Paris 2024 Olympics. REUTERS
The coach said that though Vinesh Phogat was in tears after getting disqualified, she showed grace. “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 recalled.
To underline how much Vinesh Phogat valued an Olympic medal, the coach recalled the wrestlers’ protest last year, when she, along with Bajrang Punia and Sakshi Malik, both Olympic medallists, had decided to immerse their medals into the Ganga at Haridwar. “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.
Despite Vinesh Phogat’s disqualification, the world will remember what they achieved on the first day of her bouts, he said. “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 said.
