Three and a half ounces, roughly the weight of a small banana, three slices of bread, a deck of cards.
That amount is usually insignificant, but is hugely consequential in sports with weight classes. This small but prohibited excess during a weigh-in on Wednesday morning kept the wrestler Vinesh Phogat from a chance to become the first woman from India, the world’s most populous nation, to win an Olympic gold medal in any event.
“It’s very shocking,” Virender Singh, Phogat’s coach, said in a brief interview, adding, “If she got the gold medal, it would have been a turning point for Indian sports.”
Phogat, 29, entered these Games as a celebrated figure, having overcome knee and elbow injuries and qualified in a lower weight class than her natural weight to reach her third Olympics. Last year, she helped lead public protests against what she and other athletes said was sexual abuse and harassment by the former president of India’s wrestling federation.
Her gold medal match was scheduled against an American opponent on Wednesday night. But at the morning weigh-in for the 50-kilogram (110-pound) category, Phogat remained 100 grams, or 3 ½ ounces, over the limit after trying to cut weight by running on a treadmill and sitting in a sauna. She had gained roughly three pounds, which is common, during replenishment after wrestling in three bouts on Tuesday.
“A billion hearts break,” became a common, deflated refrain in India. At the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s Olympic committee filed an appeal. But international wrestling’s rules allow no leeway. Now Phogat would get no medal at all. After the weigh-in, she was given intravenous fluids to treat dehydration.
Asked if he thought the disqualification was unfair, Singh, the coach, said, “This is the law for the world.” Instead of unfair, he called it “bad luck for India and for wrestling.” Phogat’s coaches said her response was, “It’s part of the game.”
Manu Bhaker, 22, a star in women’s shooting, had won two of India’s three medals at the Paris Games, both bronzes, through Wednesday. She became the first Indian woman to win two medals at the same Games. But gold remains elusive despite the country’s recent efforts to enhance the development, funding and encouragement of female athletes, many of whom have long faced social and cultural barriers to participation in sports.
A steeplechaser named Sonam, 19, India’s youth record-holder, said she left her village of Hurthala, southeast of New Delhi, in 2022 to escape an arranged life. Now she delivers packages for Amazon in the capital to sustain her dream of eventually qualifying for the Olympics.
“My family was forcing me to get married,” Sonam said in January at Nehru Stadium in New Delhi. “I didn’t want to. I want to do something in life.”
After Phogat’s disqualification, India seemingly still had one final chance to win gold in a women’s event at these Games. But it quickly disappeared when the wrestler Antim Panghal, 19, lost her opening match on Wednesday in the 53-kilogram (approximately 117 pounds) category. She left crying from the Champs-de-Mars Arena, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
The teenager’s story had been one of impediments overcome. Antim is Hindi for “last.” Her parents, who are farmers, acknowledged that they gave her the name because they hoped she would be their last daughter. But when Panghal began to excel at wrestling, her parents moved from the village of Bhagana in the northern state of Haryana to the town of Hisar to facilitate her training. Her father brought along three water buffaloes because, he told Indian reporters, he didn’t “trust the milk you get in cities.”
All five of India’s female wrestlers competing at the Paris Games are from Haryana, an agricultural region west-northwest of New Delhi, the capital, which provides an inordinate number of India’s Olympians, particularly wrestlers and boxers. It is also the home state of Neeraj Chopra, the reigning Olympic javelin champion, who is one of only two Indian men to win individual gold medals.
Haryana is conservative, patriarchal. In some places, girls cannot wear jeans or have cellphones. But Haryana’s state government also encourages sports participation by offering jobs, land and cash prizes to medal winners. It is a place where women can find refuge and liberation in sports.
Bhawna Sharma, 18, from Haryana, has been boxing there since she was 11 at the behest of her father, a military officer. “My whole family wants me to be someone,” Sharma said before the Olympics. “My father tells me that I’m the best in the world.”
It wasn’t until the 2000 Sydney Olympics that a woman athlete from India won a medal, when Karnam Malleswari took bronze in weight lifting. Female athletes accounted for three of the seven medals that India won at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, its best-ever showing at the Summer Games. And at the Asian Games last fall, women accounted for nearly half of India’s record haul of 107 medals.
The embrace of tens of thousands of female athletes, many from rural areas, has dovetailed with the general empowerment of women in India and the country’s intent to become an Olympic power and to host the 2036 Summer Games, sports officials say.
India’s president, Droupadi Murmu, is a woman, as is Nita Ambani, a delegate to the International Olympic Committee and P.T. Usha, the president of its national Olympic committee. Some critics, however, say India still lacks a sufficient number of female coaches and administrators.
“Women are not lacking anything,” Ms. Usha, the head of India’s Olympic committee, said in New Delhi before the Olympics. “Women are also powerful.”
A visit in January to a national training center, in the northwestern city of Patiala, showed the growing expectation for Indian women in sports like weight lifting and boxing.
“Things are not the same anymore,” said Mirabai Chanu, 30, a silver medalist in weight lifting at the Tokyo Olympics. “So many women, so many girls, have started participating in various sports. Girls have started getting out from being told they can’t do this or that.”
Winning a medal can mean something beyond individual recognition. After Lovlina Borgohain, 26, won a bronze in women’s boxing at the Tokyo Games, the stone and dirt road from her village of Baro Mukhia was paved with cement. The village was also promised piped-in water and a sports academy.
“When one woman wins a medal, it has a cascading effect,” Borgohain said.
And though Muslims have long faced discrimination in India, primarily a Hindu nation, the boxer Nikhat Zareen, 28, has become a two-time world champion, despite her mother’s initial reticence about her daughter’s career choice.
“If you get hurt, no one will want to marry you,” Zareen recalled her mother saying. To which she replied: “No, Mom, don’t worry. If I get famous, everyone will want to marry me.”
None of these stars won gold in the Paris Games. But that should not be crucial, said Sohini Chattopadhyay, the author of a book about Indian women and sports. Women are winning medals despite societal rules that often define their roles as mothers and wives, she noted in an interview on Wednesday.
“They are asked as soon as they step into the public sphere, why are you here?” Ms. Chattopadhyay said, adding, “What Indian women are doing in sports is already quite incredible.”
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