If Indian males’s wrestling is all about custom and passing the virtues from one era to a different, it could have discovered its rightful inheritor.
He’s a wiry younger man, all of 20 years previous, with a perennially scruffy look and emotionless, sunken eyes. However Aman Sehrawat additionally has shoulders constructed like bazookas, which relaxation on a rubber-like physique that’s blessed with blinding velocity.
Within the hardest of instances for the game in India – throughout a interval when the nation’s most celebrated wrestler, Sushil Kumar, was jailed; when nearly all wrestling actions stopped final 12 months as a result of protests; and when one of many greatest stars, Tokyo Olympics silver medallist Ravi Dahiya, received significantly injured – Sehrawat has remained the lone vivid spot in males’s wrestling.
And so, it was unsurprising that it was Sehrawat, the youngest man in a protracted record of India’s Olympic aspirants, who saved India from the embarrassment of going unrepresented in males’s wrestling on the Paris Video games.
The Asian champion, who competes within the 57 kg weight class, turned the primary male wrestler to safe an Olympic quota in the course of the World Qualifiers in Istanbul on Saturday.
India can add to its tally on Sunday when Sujeet Kalkal, whose swift counterattacks have been sufficient to take down some massive names within the 65 kg class however got here undone when he stumbled into reigning Asian Video games gold medallist Tulga Tumur-Ochir within the semifinal, which he misplaced. Sujeet will return to the mat once more on Sunday, hoping to profit from the second likelihood, additionally the final.
However on a day when India feared the worst after the Tokyo Olympics fifth-placer Deepak Punia went out cheaply in his first-round bout (86kg), it was Sehrawat who ended the lengthy look forward to a quota on his third jab at qualification.
Sehrawat’s rise on this curtailed Olympic cycle the place Indian wrestling has had little to cheer for has been nothing in need of meteoric. It began with a Cadet World Championship gold medal in 2021 adopted by the under-23 world title a 12 months later. Nonetheless a young person, he made a seamless transition to senior worldwide by claiming the Asian Championship gold in 2023, the 12 months the place he additionally gained the Asian Video games bronze.
However his quest to make the reduce for the Olympics wasn’t so simple. On the World Championships final 12 months, his first shot, he couldn’t make any impression however then once more, it felt just like the match got here somewhat too early for him, nonetheless a freshman.
It was anticipated that he would seal the deal on the Asian Qualifiers final month. However when he was rolled over by his opponent within the first spherical inside a couple of minutes, doubts surfaced over his skills within the unforgiving world of Indian wrestling and there have been murmurs of conducting contemporary choice trials for the Istanbul qualifiers.
Certainly, Sehrawat himself needed to grapple with the demons in his thoughts earlier than he would wrestle his rivals on the mat. On the flight to Istanbul, the younger wrestler questioned about the potential for returning empty-handed but once more. He wasn’t alone in worrying about that end result.
Even the US-Canadian commentary pair couldn’t conceal their astonishment. Each time an Indian wrestler stepped on the mat on Saturday – there have been six of them, one in every class – their crisp abstract famous the latest Olympic success and contrasted it with a qualifying marketing campaign the place the boys deeply struggled.
Given his stellar rise on this curtailed Olympic cycle, Sehrawat was anticipated to interrupt the duck. And when the time got here, he did it with minimal fuss.
He started the morning by overwhelming Valentinov Vangelov of Georgia 10-4 after which returned a couple of minutes later to beat Ukraine’s Andrii Yatsenko on technical superiority (10-0). Sehrawat seemed to be in his regular movement within the second bout, slipping between his opponents’ charging arms to get a grip on the fitting leg and changing them into takedowns.
Within the winner-takes-all semifinal, Sehrawat discovered himself up towards the difficult North Korean, Chongsong Han. Brief in peak and fast together with his actions, Han tried to check Sehrawat’s endurance by circling on the mat, biding his time to make use of his speedy actions to attain some extent. Because it turned out, that second by no means got here for the North Korean.
It was Sehrawat who used his lengthy levers neatly to assault Han from a distance, with out actually placing himself in any hazard. For years, his upper-body power, lengthy attain, explosive energy, and speedy leg-work have been spoken about extremely at New Delhi’s Chhatrasal Stadium.
On Saturday, when India wanted it essentially the most, he unleashed his weapons to outfox the North Korean wrestler. Sehrawat’s speedy leg assaults coupled with a watertight defence would have made the world and Olympic medallist wrestlers from his alma mater proud.
Ravi Dahiya, Bajrang Punia, and Deepak Punia – who’ve all reduce their tooth at Chhatrasal – may need had their Paris desires all however reduce brutally quick. However in Sehrawat, India could have discovered a brand new wrestling hope to cling onto.