Quick Comment: Vinesh should be allowed to mourn her silver loss, stop the ‘she’s a champion’ narrative

The intent of the goodly people might be sincere but the patronising “you are still a winner for us” condolences to Vinesh Phogat should stop. Especially after she has been declared a non-winner at the biggest sporting stage despite reaching the gold medal round after three victories. If you don’t agree, listen to Neeraj Chopra.

Days after his silver-medal triumph, Neeraj was asked about his expectations from Phogat’s case with CAS. Neeraj stressed the irreplaceability of a sparkling metal. “If there is no medal hanging around the neck, there is something in the heart … people will say ‘you are champion’ and ‘you are our winner’. But it doesn’t help. If you are not on the podium, people tend to forget these things, that’s my only fear,” he said.

Spare the strutting proud pehelwaan the silly sighs. She’s fought bigger battles against former Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and suffered bigger setbacks, to stomp back at the Olympics. She should be allowed to mourn a lost silver, even if it’s disorienting to think she didn’t lose a single match at Paris fighting under correct weight. She can even rant, scream and send her fans into deep depression.

One can dignify her disappointment by reminding her of how smartly she defended against Susaki, and took down Livach and ran circles around Guzman. But telling her that missing out on an Olympic medal doesn’t matter or that she must kindly move on, should stop. For those not able to process the Phogat story, there’s always the javelin silver and the hockey bronze for your silly serotonin fix.

There are those who blame Phogat and her team for the extragrams, who have no idea about sports or human physiology. Many suggested – what they think as helpfully – that she should have skipped a 100 ropes more, while she almost dropped unconscious, and lectured India’s most successful female wrestler with multiple World Championship medals on how to be disciplined, a day after she beat the Japanese goddess of the sport – Yui Susaki. And all this while, Vinesh had her ambition dialled up to beat an American, and take gold.

The anger over the miss should be directed to the absurd rules of weighing the wrestlers twice over two days and completely disregarding legitimate wins that took her to the final with a silver assured.

Even the wrestling legend Jordan Burroughs had put out bullet points dissing them. The Repechage rounds next day even partially acknowledged the losses her three opponents suffered to Vinesh Phogat, while lining them up for bronze winners. But they want to erase Vinesh as the winner.

Vinesh did not wake up last Wednesday hoping to become India’s first gold medallist, because she did not sleep Tuesday, trying to cut weight. But her real dream was shattered. And the denial of a medal that will hurt forever, does not deserve a teary placebo of polite murmuring sympathy. Just because you are content she fought the bigger fight on the streets, doesn’t mean she should not want a medal which would’ve recognized beyond doubt, her brilliance as a wrestler and added heft to that fight, where she’s not lectured by an ignoramus about discipline in her sport.

Vinesh had joked when talking to The Indian Express two months ago, about how post a medal, she will simply sit down, and enjoy a nice kulhad chai with a roti, because the woman has brutal discipline with food that her mother cries often seeing her child starve. She announced her retirement at Paris, declaring she had given up on the fight, because the struggle had gone too far. That retirement – being forced out of the mat, where she’s undefeated this Olympics – that’s the real sucker punch.

You hope she will sit with her tea, read her career obits filled with platitudes, and how she’ll still be a people’s hero beyond the mat without a medal, and chuckle at the hollowness of words, and then, like in a movie – Sultan, not Dangal – return for a final stab at the medal, four years on. Because if you didn’t know this little thing about her, she’s a damn good wrestler.

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