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A 21-year-old Aman Sehrawat was dejected after his loss to Japan's Rei Higuchi in the semifinal of men's freestyle wrestling 57kg category. But Sehrawat still had a lot to fight for. He was to face Puerto Rico's Rican Darian Toi Cruz in the bronze medal match. But after the semifinal bout, he faced a similar challenge Vinesh Phogat faced. The youngster was 4.5kg overweight as he weighed at 61.5kg.
A couple of days earlier, Vinesh missed a chance on getting her hands on the coveted gold medal as she was 100 grams overweight at the weigh-in and was disqualified from the competition. India's two senior coaches Jagmander Singh and Virender Dahiya faced a race against time as they needed to help Sehrawat shed the extra weight. The mission began hours after the semifinal bout.
Hours of hard work to shed extra weight
It started with a one-and-a-half hour mat session. Both Jagmander and Virender engaged with the wrestler during the gruelling session which was followed by one-hour hot-bath. At 12:30 Aman was at the gym running for one hour non-stop on the treadmill. After that, he was given a 30-minute break to recover. Then he had five sessions of five-minute sauna bath. In between these sessions, he was the coaches ensured that Aman drank lukewarm water with lemon and honey. He was allowed to drink coffee as well.
After everything Sehrawat and the coaches put in, Aman was still 900 grams overweight. A tired Sehrawat went for a message session. After he recovered, Sehrawat was told to do light jogging followed by five 15-minute running sessions. After much hard work at 4:30 AM, Aman stood on the weighting machine and was relieved to know he was 100 grams less then what he needed to be. Sehrawat could not catch a wink of sleep the entire night.
Vinesh’s disqualification on coaches’ minds
“I watched videos of wrestling bouts, the whole night. We kept checking his weight every hour. We didn't sleep the whole night, not even during the day,” coach Dahiya told PTI.
“Weight cutting is routine, normal for us but there was tension, a lot of tension due to what happened the other day (with Vinesh). We could not let slip another medal,” he added.
Sehrawat creates history
The hard work of Sehrawat, coaches and others in the support staff paid off as he beat the Puerto Rican 13-5 to win India’s first medal in wrestling in the ongoing Paris Olympics 2024. He broke two-time Olympic medallist PV Sindhu's record by becoming youngest ever to win an Olympic medal for India.
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