NEW DELHI: Antim Panghal , one of the Indian wrestling’s brightest medal hopes, has been left grappling with a different off-the-mat battle ahead of her much-awaited debut Olympic bout at the Paris Games on Wednesday. Antim, a two-time junior world champion and World Championships medallist, is unable to secure daily passes for her personal coach and other support staff members to enter the athletes’ village and guide her in last-minute preparations for the Games. Antim will begin her Paris campaign with a Round-of-16 clash in the women’s 53kg division which features heavyweights Japan’s Akari Fujinami, China’s Pang Qianyu, USA’s Dominique Parrish, Ecuador’s Lucía Yépez, Greece’s Maria Prevolaraki, Romania’s Andreea Ana and Sweden’s Jonna Malmgren.
It’s been learnt that Antim’s teammates and other medal hopefuls – Anshu Malik (57kg) and Reetika Hooda (76kg) – too are facing a similar problem in securing village access for their respective support staff to visit the village. Among the six Indian participating wrestlers, only Vinesh Phogat has access to her Hungarian coach Woller Akos and physio Ashwini Patil inside the village. The coach and physio are part of the official Indian contingent and have full access accreditation cards.
The coaches and support staff of other wrestlers haven’t been offered such luxury by the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and all of them are staying in different hotels outside the village. To visit their athletes, they require daily passes from the IOA’s chef-de-mission office in Paris and the Games organisers. Wrestlers have been forced to spend time coordinating with the organisers and writing mails to them to secure passes for their support staff, hampering their training schedule ahead of their bouts.
In Antim’s case, her coach Bhagat Singh , sparring partner Vikas, physio Heera Mundluru and masseur Nisha landed in the French capital on Aug 3. They checked in at two different hotels in Paris and their entire travel and stay was sponsored by Antim and her team. Singh and other members were supposed to daily visit Antim at the village for her training and sparring sessions from 9 am to 9 pm on passes provided by the organisers before exiting the facility.
“It’s been three days since we landed in Paris and we haven’t been able to visit Antim inside the village because of the absence of daily passes. We have requested the IOA’s office and organisers to provide us with the passes but there has been no response for them. The concerned people say they have a limit to issuing passes on a daily basis and that can’t be more than 20 passes per day.
We don’t know about such technicalities. All we know is that Antim’s training is getting affected because of this,” Singh said from Paris..
