India find medal path

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.

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).

So, Kumar, in the course of 90 minutes, defeated American Doug Schwab (7:4 on technical points), Bulgarian Albert Batyrov 8:4, and then Kazakh Leonid Spiridonov 3:2. As Kumar said later, “It was very tiring. But then all of us were equally tired.”

As we are finding out this week in Beijing, boxers and wrestlers, these practitioners of combat sports, are very sentimental men, given to effusive gratitude to the people who believed in them early. Kumar credited his coach, Satpal, with his win. That is the way with wrestlers. The story is told of the eventual winner in 66 kg freestyle at Sydney 2000. B Daniel Igali, a Nigerian-born Canadian, had won in overtime to enter the final. In the minutes before the match, he napped and dreamt of Maureen Matheny, a school-teacher who had become a mother figure to him after he made his home in Canada. She had since then died of cancer, but he dreamt she had come to sit by his side and say, “I am proud of you.” Igali won. Get used to these stories. Start learning the rules of combat. The idiom and texture of Indian sport are changing.