You all may not have given me a chance, Sushil Kumar told reporters after getting a bronze medal, but I knew otherwise. Indeed. Kumar had been given up as a lost cause early enough on Wednesday. After all, he had lost his second round match, had he not?

But the format gave him a second chance.

At the Olympics, with every event watchable from every venue and results updated as they happen, the story immediately flees a lost cause. But Kumar’s sport, wrestling, has from these Games embraced second chances, and having got one himself, he maintained fidelity to fate.

Michael Phelps had said that for him to take home eight golds everything had to fall into place. Kumar must be echoing the sentiment.

Consider.Kumar, 25, is a freestyle wrestler — as KD Jadhav was at Helsinki 1952 when he took bronze as India’s first individual Olympic medallist. At 5’4”, he participates in the 66 kg category. Wrestling has a complicated way of awarding points on technicality, complicated even to the otherwise clear eyed David Wallechinsky, compiler of Olympics handbooks. There are Greco-Roman wrestlers and freestyle wrestlers. In freestyle, there is no bar on grasping the opponent’s legs. Even with its stylised rules, it has an affinity to the wrestling dominant in the akharas, wrestling schools, across north India.

Now, when Kumar was on Wednesday beaten in the second round by Andriy Stadnik from Ukraine, his 2008 campaign was for all practical purposes over.

Except that from this year the rules for wrestling at the Olympics have been altered. The two finalists for the initial knock-out draw fight it out for gold and silver. But every competitor that the two of them have defeated gains a fresh lease of life. These “losers to the finalists” then fight it out for a semi-final berth and meet the two losing semi-finalists for bronze medals (there are thus two bronzes per weight category).

... contd.