How wrestler Anshu Malik qualified for the Paris Olympics

livemint.com:

Jo pichle Olympics main kami reh gayi thi woh ab yeh Olympics main puri karni hai (At the Olympics this year, I hope to overcome the things that were missing the last time around)." This is what Malik has been consistently chasing over the past few years, ever since she graduated to the senior level. At the age of 18, Malik qualified for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, losing to the eventual silver medallist, Iryna Kurachkina, while missing out on a medal in the repechage round. “There was so much to learn from that competition.

I was low on muscle mass and strength, lacked the mental toughness and just wasn’t a mature wrestler on the whole. These are the things I’ve been working on ever since," she says. After clinching silver at the World Championships and Commonwealth Games—along with consecutive medals at the Asian Championships for the last four years—Malik’s progress was hampered in 2023 due to an MCL tear in the left knee.

She first got injured during the semi-final bout of the Asian Championships in Astana in April 2023, where she finished with a bronze. “Since the Asian Games trials were coming up, we couldn’t spend adequate time on the recovery process. Ten days before the event, the same injury flared up again and I eventually missed out on the Asian Games.

It was really tough to watch it on the television, especially when you know you could have been competing there," she says. “But whether in sport or in life, you have to accept situations and keep moving forward. Because no one thing can become the sole purpose of your life." It wasn’t until November that she resumed training under her father Dharamveer, and coach Ajay Danda at the Shahid Bhagat Singh Academy in Mirchpur, Haryana.