From wrestling to boxing: The agony of cutting weight

Bengaluru: 100 grams — that’s how much a deck of playing cards or a box of 100 paper clips weigh. Vinesh Phogat was disqualified and lost an Olympic medal by that much. The Indian – who became the country’s first female Olympic finalist wrestler – was 100 grams over the stipulated 50kg during the weigh-in on Wednesday morning.
Cutting weight is among the most gruelling processes that athletes competing in contact sports like wrestling and boxing go through. They switch to a brutal little to no food or water ahead of weigh-ins.
According to chief medical officer of the Indian contingent Dr Dinshaw Pardiwala, Vinesh was found to be 2.7 kg above the allowed weight at the end of her semifinal. She was seen skipping rope in a sauna suit after her semifinal bout on Tuesday night. Sauna suits are designed to induce sweating and accelerate water loss from the body. Her team tried running a sauna all night, making her exercise, chopping her hair off, but Vinesh was still 100 grams above the permissible weight in her competition category during weigh-in on the morning of her final.
“I’ve seen professional boxers struggling to cry because there’s just no more water in the body even for tears,” says Nikhil Latey who’s worked closely with Indian Olympic athletes as a sports science and rehab expert, “Once they’ve lost all the water they can, sometimes they even chew gum to generate saliva and then spit it out to lose that final 10-20 grams.”
“During weight cutting, athletes sometimes just dab their mouths with water to get the psychological feeling of quenching their thirst. Coaches wait with sandwiches and whatever else the athlete eats so that as soon as the weigh-in is done they can just hog.”
Usually, Latey says it’s normal to go into a competition a 1.5 kgs above the required weight and shed that just ahead of the first weigh-in. “If you sleep covered in a blanket you can lose around 400 gms, because of the sweat. Then you empty your bowels, do jogging in the morning. Once you’ve finished your weigh-in you have your breakfast and your weight goes back up by another kilo and a half. The process gets a little harder with age.”
In 2019, Vinesh visited Latey’s sports science lab in Mumbai to get her Vo2 and lactate levels checked. “She was coming off a break then and her numbers weren’t good for an elite athlete. She just looked at me and said main wapas aaungi (I’ll be back). She returned after a couple of weeks and the numbers were spectacular. I haven’t met an athlete with a work ethic like Vinesh’s.”
Mary Kom’s former coach Chhote Lal talks of the time the six-time women’s world boxing champion and Olympic bronze medallist had to lose two kilograms on the morning of the weigh-in for a 2018 tournament.
“We reached Poland around 3am. She was around 2 kgs above her required weight (48kg). Mary rested for a bit and by 5am I was in her room. I usually wouldn’t get any sleep before her weigh-ins. There’s just too much tension. The weigh-in was around 7 am. She did skipping rope for 30 minutes then rested for a couple of minutes, then again jumping rope for another 30 minutes, then some shadow boxing. We’d cover her up with blankets sometimes to get her to sweat. During the 2018 World Championships in Delhi between semi-final and final, humne 2.5kg ka wazan toda (did a 2.5kg weight cut). Mary would cry at times but she’d do everything as told.”
Their bodies wrung dry of water, and running on little or no food, athletes can become irritable, suffer from mood swings and struggle to focus during weight cuts. In some cases, they can even get dizzy and collapse.
“They’re going to get angry with you over little things, snap at you during weight cuts but as a coach you have to understand it’s the body playing tricks on the athlete’s mind and keep them motivated and the mood light.”
During his time as chief India wrestling coach Gian Singh Sehrawat says he would round up wrestlers the evening before the weigh-in.
“We’d know which wrestlers have more to lose and so we’d chase them right from the evening. We’d get them to jog wearing thick, hooded sweatshirts so that they sweat. A few sips of water or some lemon tea is all they’d get. We would check their rooms before they went to bed to make sure there was no food at all anywhere in their sight.”
The United World Wrestling tweaked rules in 2017, provisioning for competition and weigh-ins over two days instead of one. Coaches agree it’s harsh on the body to make weight twice. The UWW’s rationale is they want wrestlers to compete in their natural weight category.
“When you have to do a 2kg or so weight cut, you have to lose water,” says Latey, “You can’t lose anything else. In Vinesh’s case since she’s dropped to a much lower weight category than what’s supposed to be her walkaround weight, it’s unlikely her body was carrying much water. So, there’s that much less to lose.
He added: “When you’re fighting three bouts a day your body has to be in shape to do so because as the rounds progress, your opponents are getting tougher. It’s a tough call for any team. There’s some amount of strategy plus luck needed. You have to make sure your athlete is in a position to make weight the next day but also strong enough to win today’s bouts.”