Her day was supposed to give her the first Olympic medal. But it won’t happen. This Wednesday morning, Indian wrestler Vinesh Phogat had one of the worst wake-up calls of her life after a short night when she saw the weight displayed on her scale. “Despite all the efforts made by the team overnight, she weighed a few grams over 50 kg this morning,” the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) said in a statement. 50 kg was the weight that the 29-year-old wrestler was not supposed to exceed, as she had won her first three matches yesterday, earning her a spot in the Olympic final. Below the limit yesterday morning, Vinesh Phogat was able to compete. However, it will not be the case on Wednesday, as the rules state that an athlete who fails to make weight is automatically disqualified. As a result, the three-time Commonwealth Games champion is replaced in the final by the Cuban wrestler Yusneylis Guzman, whom she had defeated in the semi-finals.
Despite her extensive international success, the Olympic Games have never been kind to Vinesh Phogat. In Rio in 2016, she injured her neck in her first match, which she won, before being eliminated in the quarter-finals in the under 48 kg category. She left the Games in tears, carried off on a stretcher due to a knee injury.
Five years and nine international gold medals later, Phogat had vowed to return from the Tokyo Olympics with a medal, this time in the under 53 kg category. Bronze medallist in this category in 2019, she approached these Games as the world number one. But despite all her determination, the wrestler will leave Japan even more frustrated than in previous Olympics, being eliminated in the quarter-finals without any hope of a second chance.
At 29 years old, and with her very first Olympic medal promised to her by making it to the final, Vinesh Phogat is experiencing a new Olympic nightmare, a true anomaly in her already immense career, all for a hundred tiny grams.