Of all the ways one can imagine about missing out on an Olympic medal, Vinesh Phogat's certainly falls in the rarest of rare category. Hours after the star Indian wrestler was disqualified from the women's 50kg final at the Paris Olympics 2024 for being 100 gram overweight, three Indian Olympic medallists - Ravi Dahiya, Saina Nehwal and Vijender Singh - told NDTV that they were astonished at the development. All of them agreed that they have never heard of such disqualification ever at top-level sport.
Here's what happened to Vinesh after she won three bouts on Tuesday to become the first Indian woman wrestler ever to enter an Olympic final. In the morning on Wednesday, at the official weigh-in, it was found that Vinesh was 100 gram over the permissible 50kg for her weight category.
India's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dinshaw Paudiwala explained in details about what happened after her three bouts and before her weigh-in on Wednesday.
"Vinesh had been competing in the 53kg till February. After that she started competing in 50kg as another athlete (Antim Panghal) had already earned the Olympic quota in that category. As you know only one wrestler from a country is permitted to compete in one category. Vinesh had two options - either to lower her weight division or increase it. Increase her weight category would mean that she could be competing against stronger athletes. Generally, reducing weight takes a lot of effort as Vinesh's natural weight is not 50kg," Pardiwala said.
"Wrestlers usually participate in a weight category less than their natural weight. It gives them an advantage since they are fighting with less stronger opponents. The process of weight cut prior to the weigh-in in the morning involves a calculated restriction of food and water.
"Besides this, the athlete needs to sweat and that sweating is done with sauna and with exercise. Now this weight cut has the benefit of putting you into a lighter weight but does cause weakness and energy depletion, and this is counterproductive to participation.
"So most wrestlers will thereafter go in for some amount of energy restoration with limited water and high energy foods.
"These are usually given after the way in the calculation from the nutritionist, which is done is Athlete specific and Vinesh's nutritionist felt that the usual amount that she takes is about 1.5 kilograms totally over the day, which gives enough energy for the bouts".
Pardiwala then went on to describe what happened after Tuesday's bouts.
"...Her post-participation weight at the end of the semi-finals in the evening was found to be 2.7 kg more than the allowed weight. The team and the coach started off their usual process, which is of course limitation of water, no food," he was quoted as saying by ANI.
"And you started with the whole process of sweating it out. Typically, you require some amount of time for that. But unfortunately, we didn't have too much time. We had just 12 hours. So the whole night, the entire team, went ahead with this whole process of trying to reduce her weight, putting her in a steam and sauna, making her exercise and whatever was medically possible.
"We tried our best to try and get that weight down. When she couldn't sweat anymore, we even had to go to some drastic measures like cutting off her hair, shortening clothes...If we maybe had a few hours more we could have achieved that 100 grams, but we just didn't have that time. Now, once she was disqualified, then the question was as a precautionary measure we do need to rehydrate her and the best way to rehydrate an athlete is by giving an intravenous fluid. So we gave her a few intravenous fluids, and she started eating and drinking. She is perfectly normal physically and medically. We've got her blood tests done just as a precautionary measure..."