When Outsiders Weigh In
On Vinesh Phogat's triumph and the damage we do with overconfidence
Three days ago, I hadn’t heard the name Vinesh Phogat. Over the course of my life, the total amount of time I’ve spent thinking about wrestling is 2 hours and 41 minutes (the runtime of the movie Dangal). And today, I cannot get the name of this wrestler out of my mind.
You have probably heard that Phogat, the first Indian woman to reach an Olympics wrestling final, was disqualified from participating in said final, because a few hours before, she weighed 100 grams more than the maximum weight in the class she had chosen to participate in (50 kg).
If you’ve ever weighed yourself on two consecutive days, this sounds absurd. Eating, drinking, sweating and pooping change your weight by more than that amount. You can lose 100 grams if you fart on the scale. And yet, for the sport to be inclusive, athletes must compete in weight classes; and for it to be fair, those weight classes must be enforced with cold precision. And where there is a rule, there is an incentive to come as close as possible to breaking it. We all speed up when we see a yellow light.
Vinesh Phogat’s natural body weight is around 55 kg, and the story of why she participated in the 50 kg category and what she went through to make that weight is worth reading, and brutal. I don’t know anything about wrestling, but it seems to me that something is broken in a system that incentivises an athlete to do things to her body that make her regularly black out in the middle of matches.
For a country starved of Olympic wins, Phogat’s journey to the final was thrilling, and her disqualification, devastating. It feels cruel that she will be denied even the silver medal that seemed certain when she won the semi-final. As for golds, we have won a grand total of seven since our independence. To have the eighth dangled under our noses and snatched away by a decimal point on a weighing machine… we instinctively looked for someone to blame.
If, when you heard this news, your reaction was “Here we go again, the incompetence of the Indian sports establishment” or “They should have checked her weight before the weigh-in” or “Why didn’t she shave her head?” —let’s chat.
We tend to underestimate the lengths to which people will go to pursue their self interest. You may believe that if your friend just listened to you and used the right cream, their acne would go away. Chances are, they don’t care about clear skin as much as you do—not that they’re emotionally attached to their moisturiser.1 People hold their noses and drink karela juice to lose weight for a wedding. To imagine that an athlete who has competed in the Olympics three times, and her world class coaches, didn't consider cutting her hair, didn’t “pay attention” to her weight or worse, didn't know the rules, is Michael Scott level delusional.
Let us be humble, and err on the side of assuming that we don't know. Let us embrace reading, and research, and asking ourselves whether we know more about a topic before contradicting someone with confidence. Questions are cool! Debate is healthy. State your opinion, but don't assume you're right. Or you might end up in the embarrassing situation of reprimanding an author for not reading her own book. And no one wants to do that, right?
Right?
Yes, in my backyard
I believe that humility is beneficial in most situations, and what I’ve said above is not contingent on Vinesh Phogat’s greatness as an athlete. It would apply to any athlete in her position and generally, any person that you are tempted to think might have acted against their own interests.2 But I find myself unable to end this post without saying that the more I learn about Vinesh Phogat, the more incredible she seems.
She has won medals in eleven of the twenty one international tournaments she’s participated in. On Tuesday, she defeated Yui Susaki, the 2020 Olympic gold medalist in this category who had won her previous 95 international matches. And Phogat broke her streak. Imagine tossing a coin and getting 95 heads in a row. Would you bet on the 96th toss coming up tails? What odds would you ask for? And it’s not just one coin—Susaki has bested 50 different wrestlers with a variety of strengths and strategies. What kind of mental strength does it take to go up against such an opponent and win?
One year before almost winning Olympic gold, Phogat was fighting a different fight.
In January 2023, she and other Indian wrestlers staged a protest to voice complaints of sexual harassment against the president of the Wrestling Federation of India. The government promised to investigate, so they backed off. Three months later, the ‘investigation’ had gone nowhere, and the wrestlers returned to the streets. They held fast until June despite police violence, then decided to move the fight to the courts.
Training time was not the only thing Phogat sacrificed here. The Wikipedia page of Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh (the man the wrestlers were accusing) reads like the script of Gangs of Wasseypur. The ruling party of India, of which Brij Bhushan has been a member since 1991, is not known for its tolerance of critics. Phogat had seen the belly of the beast, but she she stuck her neck out, and did it loudly.
She said “Yes, in my backyard.”
While I was writing this, Phogat put out this tweet:
It breaks my heart that she feels the need to ask for forgiveness. In her twenty nine years, this woman has pushed herself harder, been braver and achieved more than most people will in a lifetime. Vinesh, you have nothing to apologize for.
You are a hero.
I picked up this idea from this episode of The Seen and the Unseen with the economist Lant Pritchett. Go to 1:37:40 to hear how he told his barber that he didn’t want to have ‘superior hair’.
In particular, let us extend the same kindness to Antim Panghal, the wrestler who competed in the 53 kg category.
What do you mean I, with a Dorito crumb-laden tshirt and activity levels of a walrus, don't know better than an Olympic athlete? She might have skills, I haz WhatsApp.
This is so good. Love it, bookmarked it.
Amrita, This is a honest and fresh take on something that has been living inside my mind too. My only hope for Vinesh is she gets some peace at the end of all the fight. And for her team is they dont get scape goated into some dubious charges.