Vinesh Phogat: Everyone outside is treating me like I am a dead thing

Accused of indiscipline by the Wrestling Federation of India on her return from Japan Olympics, Vinesh Phogat isn’t sure when she would be able to return to the wrestling mat. The 26-year-old was the top seed in the women’s 53-kg freestyle event in Tokyo. But Belarusian Vanesa Kaladzinskaya shocked her in the quarter-finals.

Vinesh had been stretchered off the mat with a twisted knee in Rio five years ago.

As India celebrated its biggest Olympic tally, Vinesh felt an indescribable dilemma. “Right now, I really want to focus on my family. But everyone outside is treating me like I am a dead thing. They write anything, they do…I knew that in India, you fall as fast as you rise. One medal (lost) and everything is finished,” she wrote in The Indian Express.

“I don’t know when I will return (to the mat). Maybe I won’t. I feel I was better off with that broken leg. I had something to correct. Now my body is not broken, but I’m truly broken,” she writes.

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Phogat says she continued to feel the after-effects of a concussion she had suffered in 2017 and twice contracted COVID-19 in her build-up to Tokyo.

The two-time Commonwealth Games champion also battled mental health issues and spoke to a psychologist but felt enough attention was not paid to the issue in India.

“We celebrate Simone Biles as she said ‘I am not mentally prepared to perform at the Olympics’ and did not do her event,” she said, referring to the American gymnast who skipped most of her Olympic events in Tokyo to focus on her mental health.

“Try just saying that in India. Forget pulling out of wrestling, just try saying that you are not ready,” Phogat wrote.

“Fellow athletes don’t ask you what went wrong, they tell you what I did wrong. I am shocked that they form their own perspective. At least ask me what happened to me on the mat. Why are you putting words in my mouth that I felt a certain way? I didn’t. Sorry”.

She says she doesn’t care about the world. “But they still try to break me. I want to analyse my loss. After Rio, I cared about going back to the mat when everyone said I was finished. Why is Tokyo not my decision?” The wrestler says she did not lose because of pressure.

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She recalls the concussion in 2017. “I have suffered from it since then. Things become blurry. It has gone down a lot but when my head strikes on anything, it comes back,” she wrote.

“I prepared for the humidity, I had salt capsules, I drank electrolytes. I just wished this problem would not arise. But when it rains, it pours.”

Describing her helplessness, she writes: “Maybe it was that. Maybe it was the blood pressure. Maybe the weight cut. I’m used to salt capsules. They helped a lot. But they did not work in Tokyo where I was alone”.

She says she was reducing weight. “I was my own physio and I was the wrestler. I was assigned a physio from the shooting team. She did not understand my body,” writes the young grappler.

Amid the fight she writes what was going on within her. “After my first bout, I took a salt capsule. Nothing improved, so I took one more. No change. I could not eat anything because I was nauseous and felt like vomiting. I did some breathing exercises but to no effect. I was not feeling in control. I was shivering,”

“In the second bout, I knew I was losing. I was giving up points from positions I would never have. I can see that everything is going away but I can’t do it. My mind was blocked to that level that I didn’t know how to complete a takedown. I was surprised that I was blanked out”.