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Simone Biles and Vinesh Phogat don’t play the same sport; nor are they Olympians of equal stature . Though, they share an eerily similar story. Success for the GOAT American gymnast and the World Championship medalist Indian wrestler has come at an unfairly high price. Their tales do have feel-good chapters of sweat and sacrifices but also turn grim and dark. Sports got them wings, fulfilled their dreams but was also responsible for their worst nightmare. It first liberated them and then betrayed them. Who they thought was the gamekeeper turned out to be a poacher. The sporting institutions basked in their glory but failed to protect them from in-house sexual offenders – one found guilty, other fighting charges in court. Vinesh made sexual harassment allegations against the then Indian wrestling body’s chief and BJP leader Brij Bhushan Singh. The case continues. Simone, meanwhile, gave evidence to the Senate Judiciary Committee on FBI over sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar, the one-time US Gymnastics team doctor, a proven serial offender whose victims are in hundreds. The self-made champions, both in their late 20s, while dealing with their respective traumas didn’t give up. They will be at the Paris Games to complete an unfinished job. They will ‘the story’ across the world. The beat reporters are likely to be in the minority at wrestling and gymnastics halls in Paris. There will be pressure and expectations. It was the same last time, at the 2021 Tokyo Games. Back then the two had cracked. Vinesh lost the quarter-final bout that she should have won. Simone, after a brain fade, had to withdraw. It’s curtains for her, they said. It was curtains for none. “ Kuchh bhi karna pade (Whatever I have to do), I am not going to let this Olympic medal go,” Vinesh had confided to her team while preparing for the Paris Games. Simone, 27, is confident of walking the tightrope again. Her’s is a sport where a misjudgment of millimetres or a hint of a stumble on landing can push one off the podium. Even her well-wishers are wondering why she is risking her legacy. Neutral voices are wondering: Why put the mind through the ordeal again? It’s a question that even Vinesh gets asked. Simone, in a way, answers for both when she says: “I get to write my own ending.” It’s a line from Netflix’s pre-Olympics release ‘Simone Biles Rising’. So, what exactly happened in Tokyo? How come these bloody-minded athletes with steely nerves fluffed the lines they have been repeating for years. For Simone it was a case of, what the West calls, Twisties. It is a medical condition where the mind disconnects from the body. Like gymnasts, even the best of divers get these sudden bouts of disorientation. Years back as a six-year-old on a school’s field trip to a local gymnasium, a tiny Simone had taken to the wooden flooring like fish to water. As if directed by some unseen pull, she had run on the mat and delivered a perfect flip. Coaches were astonished, they hadn’t seen such “air awareness” in someone so young. The intrinsic power of knowing how high the body is from the floor when in mid-air is a blessing – that’s what separates a good gymnast from a great one. At Tokyo, to the utter shock of the sporting world Simone lost “air awareness”. She was no longer Miss Perfect. Disbelief had hit the stands and the dugout after Simone’s shaky landing on the vault. The star gulped in embarrassment and left the arena. On the way out, she would tell her teary-eyed teammates – “I can’t do this, I am done.”. Social media never misses a chance to kick those fallen to the ground. They would call the greatest gymnast born ‘a whiny quitter.’ Twisties is an alien world for Indian sports. Mental frailty is still seen as an excuse for being lazy or those without a drive. Vinesh was a bundle of confusion after her shock loss. She couldn’t process her defeat. She wondered if it was because of the physio that was forced on her or was it a bout of concussion she would often suffer. There was no debriefing, counselling or any kind of institutional hand holding. No one put an arm around her shoulder and said ‘koi nahi (Doesn’t matter)’ – the two every defeated athlete wishes to hear. Days after the Tokyo loss, Vinesh wrote a piece for The Indian Express to give an idea about her mind space. “Everyone is treating me like I am a dead thing … They did not even let me regret my loss. Everyone was ready with their knives,” she wrote. Later, she would allege that Brij Bhushan had called her a “ khota sikka (counterfeit coin)” in the presence of others. Simone was dealing with faceless social media trolls, but Vinesh had it far worse. Between Tokyo and Paris, Simone was forced to revisit hell while recounting to the Congress her horrible encounters with the devil who called himself a doctor. The sports’ biggest name was lending her voice to the hundreds of other victims that Nassar had abused. Miles away from the US, in India, around the same time, Vinesh was the face of Indian sport’s first-ever ‘me too’ protest. Unrelenting in her attack on Brij Bhushan, she would get dragged on the streets, talking to the media and squat by the gushing Ganga at Haridwar threatening to throw her medals. When she should have been preparing for face-offs at the Olympics, she was involved in ‘who blinks first’ with the government. During the Jantar Mantar protest days, it was tough to imagine that Vinesh had a chance to qualify for Paris. But she did. Going to impossible lengths to lose weight, she rolled past her opponents at trials with ease. Simone too would rediscover her air-awareness and perfectness. They are women of substance who have come up the hard way. Simone’s parents had a drug habit. The father was never around and her mother’s priorities too were mixed up. The once-in-a-generation gymnast, in an interview, said how her mother would feed the cat, not worried about the kids going hungry to bed. Eventually, it was her grandparents who nurtured her, got her admitted to a good school that undertook field trips to help young minds pursue non-academics options. Vinesh lost her father early, but her mother filled the void. She was her Bapu, her friend and also her role model. She often says how if her literate mother could survive the big bad world on her own, why couldn’t she – an educated gutsy wrestler? By reaching Paris with heads held high, they have shown that they aren’t what the world called them – khota sikka or whiny chokers. The baiters and critics who wrote them off, will wait for them to fail again. But after their sparkling pre-Games form, they are silent and scared. That’s the real power of Simone and Vinesh. Send your feedback to sandydwivedi@gmail.com No, Delhi, momo is not the only Nepali food there How women artists lead Madhubani paintings’ global rise Are you suffering from lifestyle creep? Jannayak traces the life and times of Karpoori Thakur Subscriber Only Books to read: Anita Desai returns with Rosarita Subscriber Only TCA Raghavan's new book joins the personal and the political Subscriber Only Bloody Ishq movie review: Vikram Bhatt's worst film Deadpool and Wolverine offers good laughs in low stakes Alice Munro, her silence and ours None
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