On Thursday morning, a dejected Vinesh Phogat posted on social media to announce her retirement from wrestling. “Wrestling won match against me, I lost… Your dreams and my courage are shattered. I don’t have any more strength now. Goodbye Wrestling 2001-2024. I will forever be indebted to all of you. Sorry,” she wrote on X.
It was hours before Vinesh’s historic gold medal match that she was disqualified from the Olympics in Paris and had her medal revoked for missing the Wednesday morning weigh-in. The Indian wrestler weighed 100 grammes too much.
The 29-year-old made history as the first wrestler from India to reach the Olympic finals and guarantee herself at least a silver medal in the women’s 50kg division. Despite the best efforts of her coaches, support staff, and the Indian Olympic Association, she was disqualified from the event after it was discovered that she was overweight during the mandatory weigh-in on the morning of her bout.
Due to extreme dehydration brought on by her desperate attempts to make the cut—which included going without food, avoiding fluids, and staying up all night sweating it out—she had to be rushed to a polyclinic in the Games village. In an attempt to lose weight, she even tried cutting her hair short. However, nothing was effective.
Vinesh, who was disqualified for being 100 grammes overweight during the morning weigh-in, filed an appeal against her disqualification in the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) late on Wednesday night. She requested that she be given a joint silver medal.
A section of the CAS has been established on an as-needed basis in Paris to arbitrate any disputes that may arise during the Olympic Games or in the ten days leading up to the Opening Ceremony.
We’ll discuss the issue Thursday morning. After losing to Vinesh in the semifinals, Yusneylis Guzman Lopez, a wrestler from Cuba, took her spot in the championship match against Sarah Ann Hildebrandt, an American.
Vinesh is now counting on CAS to co-win the silver medal with Lopez after Hidebrandt prevailed in the fight to take home the gold.
The guidelines for CAS admission of these cases are extremely explicit. In order to initiate such a request, the claimant is required to pursue “all internal remedies available to her/him pursuant to the statutes or regulations of the sports body concerned.”
The exception being situations where “the time needed to exhaust the internal remedies would make the appeal to the CAS Ad Hoc Division ineffective.”
Nevertheless, United World Wrestling (UWW), the world governing body of the sport, has informed the IOA that there is now no way to modify the weigh-in rule that resulted in Vinesh’s disqualification.
“I have nothing against that (India’s appeal) but I know the outcome,” he told Indian reporters in Paris. “I don’t see anything that can be done. It is the competition’s rules and I really don’t think it is possible (to overturn the decision),” said UWW chief Nenad Lalovic.
