Aman Sehrawat brought laurels to the country after he won India's sixth medal in the form of bronze in wrestling at the ongoing Paris Olympics on Friday, August 9. Aman became the youngest Indian ever to win an individual medal at the Summer Games as he snapped PV Sindhu's record.
Aman, aged 21 years and 24 days, defeated Puerto Rico's Darian Toi Cruz 13-5 in the men's 57kg category to break Sindhu's record who had won a silver at the Rio Olympics at 21 years and 44 days.
However, there was a point in the lead-up to his bout when his dreams of winning a medal for the country were about to diminish as he weighed 4.6 kg above the permissible limit in the men's 57 kg category.
Stacked against all odds, Aman sought the help of Virender Dahiya and Jagmander Singh, two coaches who are a part of India's six-member wrestling contingent at the Paris Olympics.
Having witnessed the tragedy that disqualified Vinesh Phogat and robbed her of an opportunity to claim an Olympic gold right in front of their eyes, the coaches couldn't let the same unfold again.
As per a report by the Press Trust of India (PTI), Aman marched on his mission to shed the extra kilos as soon as he lost his semifinal bout against Japan's Rei Higuchi at around 6:30 PM.
Both Jagmander and Virender engaged Aman in standing wrestling and followed it up with a one-hour-long hot bath session.
The coaches then took Aman to the gym at 12:30 am and made the Haryana-born run continuously for an hour on the treadmill.
The rigorous running made Aman sweat profusely and hence the coaches decided to give him a 30-minute break. Aman then went for five sessions of a five-minute-long sauna bath but despite that, he was weighing 900 grams more than the permissible weight.
However, unfazed by the daunting challenge, the coaches gave the young grappler a massage, made him jog and then asked him to follow it up with five sets of 15-minute-long running sessions.
The 10-hour-long tireless effort bore fruit and by 4:30 am Aman was weighing 56.9 kg - 100 grams less than the target. Aman didn't sleep after his painstaking training session.
"I watched videos of wrestling bouts, the whole night. We kept checking his weight every hour. We didn't sleep the whole night, not even during the day," Dahiya was quoted as saying by PTI.
"Weight cutting is routine, normal for us but there was tension, a lot of tension due to what happened the other day (with Vinesh Phogat). We could not let slip another medal," he added.
