- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Wrestler Ravi Kumar Dahiya on Wednesday (4) became the first male Indian contestant at the Tokyo Olympics to secure a medal. This is India’s fourth in this edition after Mirabai Chanu’s silver in wrestling, PV Sindhu’s bronze in badminton and Lovlina Borgohain’s bronze in boxing.
Dahiya would win at least a silver medal as he staged a great comeback against Kazakhstan’s Nurislam Sanayev in the men’s freestyle wrestling (57 kilograms) to reach the final.
In the semi-final bout, both the opponents registered points in the initial minutes and Sanayev almost won the match by scoring eight points in a row. He grabbed Dahiya by the ankles and rolled him four times and took the lead to 9-2.
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But the Indian wrestler did not give up. He first fought back to reduce the gap to 5-9 by pushing the Kazakh opponent out of the mat. The move left Sanayev surprised and he also hurt his leg. Dahiya then capitalised on the psychological lead and pinned the opponent down with a great move to eventually win by fall.
While Dahiya becomes the first Indian wrestler to win an Olympic medal since 2012, he is overall the fourth in the discipline to achieve the feat after KD Jadhav (bronze in 1952), Sushil Kumar (bronze in 2008 and silver in 2012) and Yogeshwar Dutt (bronze in 2008).
Dahiya, who has won a bronze medal at the 2019 World Wrestling Championship in the 57-kg category and secured a place at the Tokyo Games, was born in Nahri village in Sonipat district of the North Indian state of Haryana in 1997. In Asian Wrestling Championships in New Delhi in 2020 and Almaty (Kazakhstan) in 2021, Dahiya bagged the gold.
He was trained by Satpal Singh at the Chhatrasal Stadium in Delhi when he was 10. Ravi’s father Rakesh Dahiya, a farmer who worked on rented paddy grounds, would travel daily from Nahri to the stadium (around 16 miles) to deliver milk and fruits to his son as part of his wrestling diet, for more than a decade.
Dahiya won a silver medal in the 55-kg freestyle category at the 2015 Junior World Wrestling Championship in Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. In 2017, he picked an injury which saw him going out of action for more than a year. Next year, he made a strong return to win silver at the 2018 World Under-23 Wrestling Competition in Bucharest, Romania. It was India’s only medal in the 57-kg category in that competition.
In his debut at the World Championships in Nur-Sultan in Kazakhstan in 2019, Dahiya beat European champion Arsen Haruyyunyan in the Round of 16 and the 2017 world champion Yuki Takahashi in the quarterfinal to earn one of the six available quota places for the 2020 Olympics. He, however, settled for bronze after losing to defending champion and eventual gold winner Zaur Uguev in the semi-final.
The wrestler was unbeaten at the 2019 Pro Wrestling League, representing the winning side, Haryana Hammers.
