Haryana teen wrestlers Anshu Malik, Sonam Malik qualify for Olympics

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 10

Five days before her 19th birthday, Haryana wrestler Sonam Malik gave herself the best possible gift when she qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Adding icing to the cake was Sonam’s friend and one-time adversary Anshu Malik, 19, who too qualified for the Tokyo Games with an excellent performance at the Asian Olympic Qualifiers in Almaty, Kazakhstan, today.

Sonepat girl Sonam had to come from behind to reach the final of the 62kg category, after being 0-6 down in the semifinals against Kazakhstan’s Ayaulym Kassymova. Sonam then won nine points in a row to earn an Olympics quota place. “The Kazakh girl was a very good wrestler and I was trailing 0-6, but I was confident of winning even after that. This is incredible,” said Sonam, who won gold in the 2018 and 2019 Cadet World Wrestling Championship. Sonam finished with a silver as she could not compete in the final today after she seemed to have injured her knee.

Anshu, who is from Nidani village in Jind, was dominant on her way to the final of the 57kg category, conceding only two points in three bouts. In the final, she lost a hard-fought bout to Khongorzul Boldsakhian, who won 7-4. The two Maliks had reached Almaty around midnight, after a nine-hour halt between flights in Tashkent.

Both weighed around 1kg above the permissible weight in their categories, which is normal for wrestlers before a tournament, but they had little time to lose weight at the venue in Almaty. They thus exercised at the Tashkent airport to sweat out some extra weight. Today morning when they stepped on the mat, their weight was just right, and they put up impressive performances, especially after their long travel, and lack of rest and acclimatisation in Almaty.

The two girls were competitors in the 56kg category in their days as juniors. In 2016, they fought each other twice, both winning once. The two girls became friends at the national camp in Lucknow, and their families decided that they should compete in different weight categories.

With this, the representation of Indian women wrestlers at Tokyo has gone up to three — another Haryana girl, Vinesh Phogat, had qualified for the Games through the World Championship in 2019.

Sonam has established herself as India’s top wrestler in the 62kg division, with four wins in a row over Rio Olympics bronze medallist Sakshi Malik row. Sakshi had won her medal in the 58kg category but has been competing in the 60kg to 62kg divisions since then.