COVID-19 lockdown: Dahiya away from home due to fear of putting on weight

BENGALURU: THE wrestling academy in Delhi’s Chhatrasal Stadium wears a deserted look. On normal days, it houses 200 wrestlers or so, but things have changed since the lockdown. Most of them have left for home.

Just a handful of them, including Olympic-bound Ravi Kumar Dahiya decided to stay put there.
He took this decision looking at the bigger picture. Going home during this period would have meant lesser practice and with ‘ghar ka khaana’, chances of him gaining weight was an unwelcome possibility.

The 22-year-old, who has qualified in the 57kg category for the Olympics, was scared of the latter. In fact, before the decision to postpone the Olympics was made, he had decided to shift to a higher weight category after the quadrennial event, but his plan has got stalled.

"Maintaining this weight has been a problem. I was thinking of changing my weight category after Tokyo 2020, but now, I will have to push that back by a year and fight in the same category. I will have to adjust accordingly and give my best in this category till Olympics 2021," Dahiya told this newspaper.

The grappler participated in 61kg category during the Rome Ranking Series in January, where he impressed with a gold medal finish. Recently, he even told this newspaper that he wrestled in the higher category as maintaining his weight at 57 had become difficult then.

So one can understand the kind of sacrifices he is making to not put on additional weight till July next year. "I decided not go back home so that I would be able to maintain my weight. At home, I can eat four times and also whenever I want. Over here, it is just twice. It may not be massive training going on here, but I can say the training is much more than what it would have been at home. Also when the camp starts, whenever that is, I would be in good shape and hope that weight should not become much of a problem," he said.

With no trainers and coaches to keep an eye on wrestlers, Dahiya communicates with them over phone on a daily basis. He is instructed about the things to do while training at the stadium. Presently, he is training twice a day. It involves weight training, exercises and moves.

On the mat, the wrestler has been in fine form in major competitions, including the World Championships, winning bronze last year. He also won gold in the Asian Championship earlier this year. More importantly, in the last 12 months, he has defeated big names, including Yuki Takahashi, who was the 2017 world champion.

"In some of the competitions that I participated, I was happy with the kind of results I got. You can say there is a certain degree of confidence in my game, but I have to constantly improve and train hard to prepare for the Olympics," concluded Dahiya.