Headstrong, and outspoken, the one thing that Phogat has steadfastly refused to be is a quitter, on the mat or off it.
There could be a Sisyphean parallel to the Vinesh Phogat story. A day after she beat the seemingly invincible Yui Susaki in the 50kg freestyle wrestling category and reached the Olympics final, her disqualification for having gained marginally over the permissible weight ahead of the finals — as per rule, wrestlers have to stay within their weight category on both days of the competition — seems to be the story of a tragic figure felled by fates bigger than her. But tragedy has never been Phogat’s genre.
Over and over again, through a rollercoaster of a career, Phogat has been persistent in her refusal to be typecast as a tragic figure. Not for her the quiet resignation of Sisyphus, but the courage of the Herculean. And so, as the Indian Olympic Association appeals against the disqualification, amid the heartbreak there burns a steady belief in Phogat’s resilience and her resurrection.
At 29, though, in what is all but certain to be her last Olympics, the death of a dream rankles. Phogat’s familiarity with heartbreak runs deep. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, her medal dream crashlanded after a debilitating knee injury on the mat. Tokyo 2021 dealt her a shock exit and bewilderment made worse by the relentless accusations by the very authorities meant to nurture athletes like her. In their eyes, she was a “khota sikka”, an under-performer. Only, they had misjudged. Headstrong, and outspoken, the one thing that Phogat has steadfastly refused to be is a quitter, on the mat or off it. She has fought against injuries and obstacles, depression and self-doubt, but most of all, against an unresponsive system invisiblising its women and their calls for justice.
A year before the Olympics, when her international colleagues were preparing for Paris, Phogat, Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia were out on the streets of the Capital, waging a lonely protest against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then head of the Wrestling Federation of India, amid allegations of prolonged sexual harassment of women wrestlers.
The image of Vinesh and Sangeeta Phogat, decorated athletes, pinned to the ground by the police before being detained, is one that is unlikely to ebb soon from public memory. The fights her opponents get into are on the mat, governed by a strict set of rules, some of which have now stripped Phogat of a medal. In taking on Singh, an influential member of the BJP, Phogat had launched herself into a street fight with no rules, one that was already skewed against her.
For all the slogans of “nari shakti” and women-led development, India still remains a country that largely expects its women to be “good” in a patriarchal sense of the term – docile, unquestioning and subservient — content to be beneficiaries than equals. It is women such as Phogat who show the possibilities of not settling for less, of holding on when everyone else has given up, getting up after every fall, no matter how hard or how bruising the fall. A medal might have eluded Phogat at the Olympics, but in her courage and her grit, Vinesh Phogat is a champion for all seasons, burnished brighter than gold.
