Two weeks ago, female wrestler Vinesh Phogat became the first woman from India to make the Olympic finals—and was promptly disqualified for being 100 grams overweight.
On August 9, Vinesh Phogat announced her retirement from the sport of wrestling in a post on X. After the previous day’s incidents, it was a message that many had been expecting.
Vinesh experienced the highest of highs at the Paris Olympics. She defeated an unbeaten Olympic champion wrestler who was considered not just the favourite in her weight division but across every weight division at the quadrennial event. She became the first Indian woman wrestler to reach an Olympic final. However, Vinesh also faced the lowest of lows at the Olympics. No one had ever reached an Olympic final only to be denied the chance to compete because they had failed to make weight on the day of the competition.
Vinesh had taken her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, seeking at least to be awarded a silver medal by virtue of reaching the final. If she had succeeded, she would have set a precedent, but, much to the disappointment of the nation, her appeal was turned down by the sole arbitrator, Annabelle Bennett.
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Vinesh has always been a fighter. Tragedy has followed her, yet somehow, against the odds, she has emerged victorious.
When she was nine, her father was shot dead by someone in her village, believed to be a mentally disturbed relative, just outside their front door. Her mother, a young widow, refused the custom of marrying her husband’s brother. She battled cancer single-handedly. Through it all, she raised a firebrand daughter, who refused to back down.
Her cousins, who grew up near her home, were the more famous girls of the family. Geeta and Babita were among the first to win gold at the Commonwealth Games. They had a movie made about them — Dangal — which made the ‘Phogat sisters’ iconic in Indian sports.
Vinesh didn’t feature in that movie. The events described in it took place too early in her career. But she wouldn’t be satisfied with being one of the Phogat sisters — she would become ‘The Phogat’ sister.
Talk to any of her peers .— and even some of her rivals in Indian wrestling – and there is, in some cases, grudging, genuine respect. She is considered the most instinctive and natural wrestler India has ever produced in women’s freestyle wrestling.
Her career is as much a highlight reel as anything out of a movie. No one in women’s wrestling compares. No Indian woman wrestler has won three Commonwealth gold medals as she did in 2014, 2018, and 2022. No one has won an Asian Games gold medal as she did in 2018. No one has won two World Championships medals as she did in 2019 and 2022.
The one medal missing from her collection is the Olympic medal — which she fought bitterly for.
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Vinesh has had terrible luck at the Olympics — the only competition that seems to matter to Indians. In 2016, she was one of the favourites in the Indian team before her knee was bent out of shape in the quarterfinals. In 2020, she was one of the world’s favourites to medal in the women’s 53kg weight class. Then, suddenly, a freak weight cut left her physically and psychologically broken, unable to coordinate her movements on the mat. She lost to a wrestler she had beaten comfortably just a month before. Now, in Paris, another poor weight cut left her at the lowest point of her wrestling career.
Her battles, though, haven’t been restricted to the mat. Perhaps the most significant one Vinesh has fought has been for the safety of young girls in the sport. In pursuing this fight, she took on one of the most powerful men in Indian sports — Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
When her rivals were preparing for the Olympics, Vinesh was fighting on the streets of New Delhi, where she, and few other fellow wrestlers, accused Brij Bhushan, a five-time member of parliament and the long-time president of the Wrestling Federation, of sexual harassment.
The longer she stayed on the streets, the slimmer her chances on the mat became. Yet, she continued to prioritise what she felt was right. In doing so, Vinesh showed the kind of courage almost uniformly lacking in most sportspersons in India. Most of them, as the saying goes, “crawl when asked to bend.” Vinesh’s spine has been ramrod straight. She had the courage to take on the system without caring about the consequences. She displayed it even though it cost her what she loved the most — the chance to wrestle.
Only when her protest was forced off the streets and entered the court did Vinesh finally get a chance to compete.
This article delves into her struggle to rein in her weight as the Olympic timeline unfolded. It's horrifying to read.
TW for fatphobia and people with eating disorders and body dysmorphia: fatphobia:
Even as she had been winning, Vinesh’s nutritionist had been nervously monitoring her food and fluid intake.
She had a celebratory glass of juice in the morning right after she had first made weight – 300 grams. She had another couple of litres of fluid to rehydrate herself before her bout - another 2000 grams of body weight gained. A couple of light snacks throughout the day to keep her energy up meant 700 grams more.
By the time Vinesh was done with her day’s competition, she weighed 52.7 kg.
August 7:
As the hours rolled into the night, it was clear that something had gone very wrong. After weeks of dehydration, the human body, once it gets rehydrated, simply refuses to give up water. Even urination becomes impossible.
Vinesh didn’t sleep all through the night of August 6. She was on the treadmill for six hours and in the sauna for another three. She didn’t consume a bite of food or drink a drop of water. Every few hours, she stood on a weighing scale. The numbers were getting smaller but not fast enough. In desperation, her coaches trimmed the elastic in the bottom of her costume. They thought of chopping her hair and then did it.
But the scale didn’t budge.
The function of weight classes is to prevent outsized mismatches in strength due to body mass and minimize injury. Pathologizing what is clearly water weight to this extent and subjecting athletes to this kind of psychological torture due to minute variables is simply making what is essentially a safety measure into a punitive arbitrary criteria that has huge implications for racialized fatphobia for female athletes and the reinforcement of toxic diet culture across the board. It's misogynistic, unscientific and fucked. This article goes into more detail about Phogat's career-long battle with her weight— a yo-yo of losing too much, and then too little. Indistinguishable from an eating disorder, only one imposed by the standards of international sports.
You will never convince me that a white athlete would have been disqualified in the lightest weight category for a weight less than a bar of soap. The disqualification retroactively places her dead last, which is added cruelty. The refusal to revise this and even award her a joint silver is just adding racist insult to racist injury.
Phogat spoke two days ago about her devastation at being disqualified by racism and fatphobia with a three page post on twitter.
And on top of all of this, because the Indian National Congress political party welcomed her with a road show that outshone the alt-right BJP's own planned welcome, the Hindutvas in her own country have launched a hate campaign against her.
This copy-paste has "disqualified in Rio 2016" trending on twitter. It's doubly cruel and fatphobic because she wasn't disqualified for being overweight, she sustained a knee injury.
After the witch hunt against Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, I'm just so fucking done with the Olympics. The outsize importance of this competition is nothing but an anvil to break entire careers on and offers female athletes of colour on a platter for all the world's vultures.
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Actually I really wanna write a role reversal gerrymichael au and let me be so, so transparent when I say it is literally just bc I wanna fantasize about the tall, gangly blond man beating monsters to death
Everyone else has the same roles. Mary Keay is still Mary Keay in all her abusive and obsessive glory; Gertrude is still the Archivist.
Vaguely spiral aligned Michael who Does Not Like It. Pretends his connection is a hell of a lot looser than it is.
The only benefit (that Michael thinks of the Spiral) is how he can move around the Institute with relatively little interference and watch, after all, it is hard to behold something that is both nothing and everything and never was all at the same time.
Gerry ran away from home really young and actually succeeded. Spent a few years fucking around and learning what kind of benches are best to sleep on before applying to the Magnus Institute because that's what his dad did. He lied to hell and back on the application, but was hired quickly because of how thoroughly touched by the entities he was (thanks Mary) and Gertrude was running low on assistants. Gerry also felt completely justified in faking stuff and that he was perfectly qualified bc he grew up in a bookshop and how much different could it be (very different, as it turns out).
They first meet each other when Michael is prowling through artefact storage like it was a shopping mall, and pocketing everything he saw that didn't immediately mesmerize him. He was nervous and jumpy as all hell, even though this was not the first time he's done something similar and he's fairly certain Gertrude doesn't care, so when Gerry first spotted him from behind, he was immediately suspicious even before he saw Michael try to shove a lamp into his jacket pocket. This led to an altercation that eventually led to the lamp being accidentally turned on, Michael smashing it to pieces with a hammer Gerry had not realized Michael had, and Gerry suddenly being a lot more consciously aware of the supernatural than he was.
Gerry's mother was still obsessive over Lighteners, and she didn't make an effort to hide what she did, but she didn't actively try to educate Gerry on anything to do with the Fears. So he is fairly knowledgeable on the supernatural, but he doesn't know anything concrete about the Fears themselves and their categorization. The role of a stand by sacrifice instead of an errand boy and heir.
Michael still trusts Gertrude, but this time he knows he shouldn't and hates himself for it. Gerry wants to trust Gertrude, and she does hide him from anything Fears related and behaves around him like she did Michael in cannon, but he just feels something off about her and doesn't like it. She's just a bit too much like his mother for him to let his guard down.
Michael gets referred to by "it/its" pronouns once by Gerry as a teasing joke before Gerry fully knows what he is and is absolutely terrified by how happy the pronouns make his feel. (He thinks, maybe, that the Michael of his childhood liked something similar, too, but everything too far back is all twisted and he doesn't know what has been touched by the Spiral and what hasn't, so he doesn't trust any of it). He/it Michael ftw
At one point Michael just started putting black lipstick on himself because some of Gerry's always stuck to him when they kissed anyways n this gave them plausible deniability. Michael will never admit to the little spiral thrill it gives him when people do a double take upon seeing his face, the black lipstick contrasting literally everything else about his style.
Gabriel attempted to track Michael down exactly once, a few years before he joined the institute. He had heard about Michael's unsavory... Hobby... (<- reckless destruction of artefacts and throwing himself at all monsters and avatars he sees with a murderous rage regardless of their affiliation) but spiral avatars capable of holding a conversation are so few and far between and the Great Twisting was almost prepared, so he thought a meeting would be worth it. He showed up at a cafe Michael frequented one day expecting lovely, but tense, conversation, only to promptly lit on fire (mostly) in the back alley behind the cafe after he introduced himself. Gabriel survived, but some of his clay body still hardens unexpectedly or shows signs of firing from time to time.
Occasionally Michael's eyes will change colors and shapes, so he likes to put contacts in (he used to just use tinted glasses, but after one time of Gerry getting lost in his eyes in the far too literal, not at all romantic, sense, he decided to invest in smth a bit harder to take off and forget about). Unfortunately, this sometimes means other, very much not his original eyes will pop up around his body and in his hair as protest when he puts them in. It's not very fun to have to chase off eyes at 6am, but he does it regardless and complains the whole time about how he shouldn't have to deal with eyes when he very clearly isn't of The Eye.
Gerry: Oh hey you were running pretty late. I was starting to get worried.
Michael, not about to admit he spent an extra thirty minutes to get ready yelling and brandishing a lighter at a door that was following him around like a lost puppy: Ummmmmm I forgot my wallet. :((
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