Meet Fighter, Olympic Champion And All Rounder Sweetheart 'Sakshi Malik'

How did the state with the fewest girls in India produce the toughest women in sport? The story of fighter and Olympic champion Sakshi Malik is really a much larger one.

- Amit Varma

It is August 17, 2016, and two women in wrestling costumes eye each other warily. In a few moments, they will grab each other and start grappling. Both women have waited for this moment all their lives—this is the Olympic Games. Six minutes later, one of them will have a bronze medal, and be a hero to millions. The other will be disconsolate, the dreams of a lifetime crushed.

Wrestling seems simple, involving strength and power, body against body, but actually requires enormous finesse and intricacy. “It is a sport that needs brain, not brawn,” the woman who wins this fight later tells me. Sakshi Malik, 23 years old, from Rohtak, Haryana, needs more than brute force alone to win. She and her opponent, Aisuluu Tynybekova from Kyrgyzstan, are almost playing chess with their bodies, trying to induce small errors from their opponent: errors of balance, movement, emphasis. It is a game of small margins; if Malik steps a millimetre in the wrong direction, or shifts her weight a microsecond too early or late, she will lose.