Imagine being Vinesh Phogat.
Imagine being 100 grams away from an Olympic medal, from a lifetime's dream, from the culmination of one of the greatest battles any Indian athlete has ever been in.
At this moment, that's all that matters: What Vinesh Phogat is going through. How Vinesh Phogat is feeling. Not our anger, our desperation, our deep sadness. Nothing in Indian sport has ever underlined the cruel solitude of the athlete as much as the events of Wednesday, August 7.
Nobody else can feel what she is feeling, no one else can carry that pain. This is hers to bear, and hers alone. On the day she was supposed to fight in the biggest match any Indian has ever fought - no Indian woman wrestler has qualified for an Olympic wrestling final - Vinesh was disqualified for being 100 grams over the permissible 50 kg limit. Cruelty unbound.
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The debates on the unhealthiness of weight cuts can drag on, as can the forensic examination of what Vinesh and her team did or could have done or should have done -- but they are academic, post facto and change nothing. The number on the scale read 50.1 kg, the words next to her on the entry list reads 'DQ'.
Which is why it's important that we focus on Vinesh. The system needs to turn all its attention on making sure she is taken care of, physically and mentally and in every other manner. Her physical health would have been teetering after the brutality of the weight cuts, but it's her mind that should take top priority.
Think about it. For us witnessing this from miles away, it was too much to take, this swing from euphoria to gloom overnight. Imagine what would be running around in her mind. Imagine her psychological state of being.
Imagine, too, that this is third time unlucky. At Rio 2016, she had been a firm favourite till an ACL gave away. Stretchered off the mat, her tears left a deep mark on us, but even more so on her. After Tokyo 2021 and another brutal series of weight cuts, she went into near depression, as she herself admitted. "I was alone," she had written in the Indian Express a few months post that. "My body wasn't picking up and mind had given up. Imagine how it must feel if it reaches a stage where an athlete wants to stop doing the only thing she has done all her life?" She had come back from that deep, dark corner of her own mind and gone on to continue winning medals everywhere. "One more shot," she had said then. Paris 2024.
That shot has now been taken away, for practically no fault of hers. She had done everything on the mat -- including beating a supposedly unbeatable phenomenon -- but she was stopped inches away from glory off it. Imagine the place she is in now. Support, support, support... that must now be the mantra of all those around her. To surround her with (and this may sound horribly naïve and even cliched) positivity, to remind her of who she is, that an absence of one medal cannot take away from the basic fact that she is Vinesh Phogat.
And in that, perhaps, lies the road ahead. Vinesh Phogat the wrestler will be almost 34 by the time Los Angeles 2028 rolls around, and it will be a ridiculously tough ride there -- even if she finds the motivation to go for it one more time. Will the Asiads and the CWGs and the World Championships of the world spur her on? She's already won medals across all those competitions. It's the big one that she so desperately wanted. Can she go through it all over again? The question is, does she have to?
Vinesh Phogat the champion is ageless. She had not walked into Paris as merely an elite wrestler. She has become so much more than that. The grandest stage of them all paled in front of the aura of Vinesh. Over the past 18 months, a side of her had emerged that we'd never seen in elite Indian sport -- one where she truly embraced the fact that she's bigger than sport. Where she knows the impact she can have. Shut up and wrestle? No, thank you.
She's now adopted wrestling as her own - "what if it was someone from my family" - understood that without actual presence nothing changes - "A tweet alone is not enough" - and gone about trying to change everything. With fellow champions Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia by her side, she's hurled herself headlong into the fight with the realisation that if you want change, you need to go out there and change it. Flip the system on its head, fight it like you would an undefeated Japanese champion: stay in the fight, stay patient, keep your head, then go all out when the time's right. It's that fight that India needs from Vinesh Phogat, whether she gets back onto a mat or not. The three wrestling greats succeeded only partially last year - getting a case filed against a man of Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh's influence, seeing him in court having to defend himself on criminal charges - is quite incredible, but the election was won by the Singh camp and the defining image of that process will remain the newly-elected head of wrestling, Sanjay Singh, heading straight to the Brij Bhushan residence and handing over all his garlands to the former chief.
This almost broke them, but the key word there is 'almost'. Vinesh and Sakshi and Bajrang didn't become who they are by allowing others to break them, by running away when the fight got tough. Sakshi, for instance, retired from wrestling, considered staying away from it all, but then decided that enough was enough, that she would get stuck in, try and change it all from the inside out. Perhaps that's the realisation that will help Vinesh Phogat soon. It is what should drive her on. Our society, our system, is crying out for heroes like her to step up and be the change - and if there's one thing we know about her, it's that she will always step up when called upon. She's already embraced it, she now just needs to be reminded of it.
And so we need to be there today for Vinesh Phogat, because tomorrow we will need Vinesh Phogat to fight for us.