Indian wrestler Aman Sehrawat won the bronze medal for India in the 57kg freestyle at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on Friday. However, Sehrawat weighed in at 61.5kg after Thursday's semi-final, some 4.6kg over the permitted limit, causing concern for Indian coaches Jagmandeer Singh and Virender Dahiya, who had already seen Vinesh Phogat disqualified for being just 100g overweight. But what followed was a remarkable journey over the next 10 hours as the coaches and Sehrawat worked tirelessly to shed 4.6kg before the bout.
Sehrawat began with an hour and a half on the mat, where both coaches engaged in standing wrestling. This was followed by an hour-long hot bath session and at 12.30pm the 21-year-old hit the gym for an hour-long treadmill session.
Sehrawat was then given a 30-minute break, followed by five sessions of 5-minute saunas to help him lose weight through sweating. Despite his best efforts, Sehrawat still weighed 900 grams more than the permitted limit after the last session.
He then did some light jogging, followed by five 15-minute running sessions. In between these sessions, Sehrawat was given lukewarm water with lemon and honey and some coffee to drink.
By 4:30 am on Friday, he finally weighed 56.9kg, 100g less than cut off. Sehrawat said he could not sleep after that and watched videos of wrestling bouts after that the whole night.
Indian coach Dahiya while speaking on the 21 year old's remarkable weight loss journey (as quoted by PTI), said“We kept checking his weight every hour. We didn't sleep the whole night, not even during the day… 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,”
