Haryana's wrestling monks: How one state claimed all 18 Asian Games spots
Haryana's wrestlers have claimed every available place in India's Asian Games squad after dominating the trials. The sweep from the athletes shows how the state, deep-rooted in their traditional methods, can dominate the rest.
When San Antonio Spurs’ 7’4” star Victor Wembanyama spent an offseason, head shaven, at the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province, the sports world watched in something close to reverent awe. He trained in kung fu every day, ate vegan monastery food, meditated twice a day, and hiked mountain routes in total darkness.
The global sports media wrote reams about it. Here was a multimillion-dollar icon, a generational talent, voluntarily trading the glitzy glamour of the NBA for absolute silence and the monotony of monastic discipline. “My aim in going there,” Wembanyama told The Shop at Fanatics Fest in New York, “was to push my body beyond its usual limits and enhance my range of movement and strength.” The world treated it as exotic, an oddity: a basketball star, willing to find that extra gear through an exile.
Across the dust-blown heartland of Haryana, in villages you may have heard of but never visited, young girls and boys do this routinely. They are the wrestling monks. In the dead summer heat, in the lanes of Rohtak, Sonipat, or Jhajjar, where ten minutes of direct exposure to the sun would load you with enough Vitamin D to last a year, kids are up at four in the morning, doing that Shaolin routine like daily-wage earners clocking in. No cameras. No media. No one watching. Shaolin would do good to open a franchise in Haryana.
While the nation had its head buried in the IPL jamboree: on the television in the dhaba, on the distracted auto driver’s screen alive with sixes as he sashays through rush hour, not many noticed that one state quietly picked up all 18 available slots in the wrestling team for the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya. No other state, infrastructure or otherwise, could claim even one qualifying position.
In Haryana, even the soil wrestles with itself. It loves the churn, the dust blowing over, the akhara’s mitti, slightly moist after a spray, welcoming the thick-thighed wrestlers as they knead the earth with feet and knees. In these rural pockets, thousands of young men and women routinely strip themselves of the modern world’s distractions to enter a self-imposed, monastic grind. There are no autograph seekers here, no requirement for digital validation. It is a sanctuary of packed earth where work towards a podium, far into the future, is measured solely in sweat, suffering, and dates ticked off a calendar.
Has this, all eighteen wrestlers from one state, ever happened in Indian sport? The answer, with very few exceptions across any discipline at any major Games, is no. Not in athletics. Not in boxing. Not in shooting. In wrestling, many in the state didn’t even treat it as news. They expected it. And that, in itself, is the real story.
Haryana Sports Minister Gaurav Gautam was exultant when asked: “Why are you surprised? We were expecting it.” He paused, then added: “Wrestling in Haryana is spiritual. Every kid in the state, in the centres that support the sport and even where wrestling may not be that popular, loves feeling the soil on their body. They live to play the sport. In essence, it’s a part of Haryana’s soul.”
The women’s team reads like a rollcall of the new Haryana. Antim Panghal, 21, from Bhagana village in Hisar district, a farmer’s daughter competing in local dangals at ten, is now a two-time U-20 World Champion, the first Indian woman to win that title, and the heir apparent to Vinesh Phogat’s weight category. At the trials at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Stadium on May 30, she beat the very woman who had just knocked out the Olympian Phogat in the semis. Antim’s father, Ram Niwas Panghal, once rented a house in Hisar, so his daughter could commute 20 kilometres each way to training. “She wakes up at 4 am,” he said. “She practices twice a day, and she has never once complained.”
It is a story repeated in most families. It is also a paradox: Haryana has deep-seated patriarchal norms and a skewed sex ratio. But government crackdowns and community-led initiatives have, indirectly, used sport to shift something. There is enormous pride when a girl wins a bout. A medal can dismantle a generation of prejudice faster than a policy ever will.
Alongside Antim goes Manisha Bhanwala of Rohtak, a gold medallist at the 2025 Asian Championships; Mansi Ahlawat, also Rohtak, bronze medallist at the 2024 World Championships; Nisha Dahiya of Panipat, an Asian Championships silver medallist and Paris Olympian who overcame injuries that would have ended most careers; Priya Malik of Jind, a multiple junior World and Asian medallist; and Dipanshi, who earned the 50kg berth on domestic form. Six weight categories. Six Haryana girls.
On the men’s side, Olympic bronze medallist Aman Sehrawat, World No. 1 Sujeet Kalkal, and Asian Games silver medallist Deepak Punia head a freestyle unit of complete Haryana lineage. The Greco-Roman team, led by Sunil Kumar, mirrors the same geography.
To someone unfamiliar with India’s sporting topography, the statistics look fabricated. Haryana accounts for 2 percent of India’s population. It has contributed more than 30 percent of the country’s individual Olympic medals in history. At Tokyo 2020, 31 of India’s 126 athletes, nearly a quarter of the entire contingent, were from one state. In Paris, 24 of 117 athletes carried a Haryana address on their accreditation. When the Sports Minister says, ‘what's new, we just need to keep getting better,’ his confidence is not bluster.
Why?
Ask a Haryanvi and the answers come quickly: government incentives, a martial Jat tradition, a protein-rich dairy diet. All fair points. But Maharashtra and Punjab also have fertile agricultural lands, a physical culture, and government support. Neither sends eighteen wrestlers to an Asian Games.
“The true strength of Indian wrestling,” said Yogeshwar Dutt, Olympic bronze medallist at London 2012 and the sport’s most important ambassador, at his Rohtak academy earlier this year, “lies in the soil of the villages and the traditions of akhadas. When young athletes receive the right guidance, training, and opportunities, they emerge as champions who bring glory to the nation.”
The word soil is not a metaphor here. It carries weight. Discipline flows through the soil here and not through a stadium. In the village akharas, wrestlers still train on clay even as the national circuit moved to synthetic mats decades ago. The clay teaches balance, aggression, body intuition. A Haryana wrestler competes in roughly 60 bouts a year, the mud dangals alone delivering more competitive exposure than most national-level wrestlers from other states accumulate across their entire careers.
Looking at an akhara merely as a training facility is staring at the wrong end of the story. The akhara is a village ecosystem. A social institution. At Chandgi Ram Akhara in Sisai village, Hisar, named after the 1972 Olympian Master Chandgi Ram, who remains the village’s presiding deity, wrestlers eat together, sleep on mats in common rooms, wake before dawn and are shaped by coaches who make no salary from the state and charge no fees from families. Some akharas sit beside tubewell pumps, with wheat fields running flat to the horizon. For three generations, they have produced wrestlers. The density of these informal, community-funded, zero-cost institutions has no parallel in Indian sport.
“Other states don’t have the akhada tradition. So, they cannot produce at the speed at which Haryana does. But we haven’t tampered with the process. Didn’t bring in high-sounding ideas. Yes, modernisation is needed always. But passion is inborn,” says Olympian wrestler turned coach Gian Singh Sehrawat.
This is a standing rebuke to the infrastructure-first argument that Indian sports administration has held dear for twenty years: that you build the stadium first, and then the champion follows. Haryana’s wrestlers prove the opposite. The guru-shishya bond, both lathered in the same soil the guru once wrestled in, is a data transfer no biomechanics lab can replicate. At least, not spiritually.
“Haryana needs good coaches to bring more medals not only at AG but World Championships and Olympic Games. We don’t have good coaches. Coaches keep saying “pakdo, pakdo, pakdo.” I keep asking them “kya pakdo?” said Gian Singh.
“They say good players don’t often become good coaches. A few might not. But I believe, ‘good players can become good coaches because they understand the sport.”
The state government, wise and canny, understood this and built around it rather than replacing it. Since the early 2010s, Haryana has offered the most comprehensive athlete-welfare architecture in India: Olympic gold medallists receive 6 crore in prize money, a Class A government post, and a pension. Asian Games gold brings a Class B post. Medal winners at continental championships qualify for Class C. The policy is simple. Life-changing. For a family in a village where a government job is the ultimate social safety net, it transforms wrestling from a passion into a plan. Parents sit around akharas watching their kid’s train. If they are working, it is the grandfather who sits, watching, dreaming of Olympic glory for a grandchild he may not live to see on the podium. “That is exactly the culture,” as Yogeshwar Dutt puts it.
The competition inside Haryana is fierce in a way that has no domestic equivalent. The state trials are in effect an Olympic-grade bracket. The hype brings villages and towns together; think of the Jamaican Schools Athletics Championships, that hundred-year-old institution that produced Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser and turned sprinting into a national religion; in vehicles of every size and make, some arriving a day early. At last month’s women’s trials, Meenakshi Goyat, from Chabri village in Jind, had already beaten Vinesh Phogat, the most decorated Indian woman wrestler in history, before losing to Antim in the final. In men’s freestyle, a Haryana wrestler who cannot crack the state’s first-choice squad regularly transfers to another state. Third-string Haryana, as one coach famously noted, routinely beats the best that Maharashtra, UP, or Punjab can offer.
When Victor Wembanyama emerged from the Shaolin Temple after ten days, head shaved, body leaner, reportedly somewhere between NBA star and Buddhist monk, the world stood up and applauded. He had chosen discipline over comfort. Grit over glamour. And the sports world, unused to such voluntary austerity from its biggest stars, treated the gesture as extraordinary.
Wembanyama went to the monastery to find something extra. Haryana’s wrestlers are born inside one. Eighteen of them have just proven it, claimed every available slot on the national squad, and headed to the Asian Games from a state that has no modern infrastructure or hosted big tournaments, and no cricket team worth talking about. Only the soil. And the passion to wrestle with it.
As they say, wrestling Mitti (soil) Ka Game Hai. Haryana loves it Mitti (soil). We are born out of it. Will die in it. Somewhere in the middle, they also wrestle with it.
Shaolin should open that franchise. The waiting list would be long.
When San Antonio Spurs’ 7’4” star Victor Wembanyama spent an offseason, head shaven, at the Shaolin Temple in China’s Henan province, the sports world watched in something close to reverent awe. He trained in kung fu every day, ate vegan monastery food, meditated twice a day, and hiked mountain routes in total darkness.
The global sports media wrote reams about it. Here was a multimillion-dollar icon, a generational talent, voluntarily trading the glitzy glamour of the NBA for absolute silence and the monotony of monastic discipline. “My aim in going there,” Wembanyama told The Shop at Fanatics Fest in New York, “was to push my body beyond its usual limits and enhance my range of movement and strength.” The world treated it as exotic, an oddity: a basketball star, willing to find that extra gear through an exile.
Across the dust-blown heartland of Haryana, in villages you may have heard of but never visited, young girls and boys do this routinely. They are the wrestling monks. In the dead summer heat, in the lanes of Rohtak, Sonipat, or Jhajjar, where ten minutes of direct exposure to the sun would load you with enough Vitamin D to last a year, kids are up at four in the morning, doing that Shaolin routine like daily-wage earners clocking in. No cameras. No media. No one watching. Shaolin would do good to open a franchise in Haryana.
While the nation had its head buried in the IPL jamboree: on the television in the dhaba, on the distracted auto driver’s screen alive with sixes as he sashays through rush hour, not many noticed that one state quietly picked up all 18 available slots in the wrestling team for the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya. No other state, infrastructure or otherwise, could claim even one qualifying position.
In Haryana, even the soil wrestles with itself. It loves the churn, the dust blowing over, the akhara’s mitti, slightly moist after a spray, welcoming the thick-thighed wrestlers as they knead the earth with feet and knees. In these rural pockets, thousands of young men and women routinely strip themselves of the modern world’s distractions to enter a self-imposed, monastic grind. There are no autograph seekers here, no requirement for digital validation. It is a sanctuary of packed earth where work towards a podium, far into the future, is measured solely in sweat, suffering, and dates ticked off a calendar.
Has this, all eighteen wrestlers from one state, ever happened in Indian sport? The answer, with very few exceptions across any discipline at any major Games, is no. Not in athletics. Not in boxing. Not in shooting. In wrestling, many in the state didn’t even treat it as news. They expected it. And that, in itself, is the real story.
Haryana Sports Minister Gaurav Gautam was exultant when asked: “Why are you surprised? We were expecting it.” He paused, then added: “Wrestling in Haryana is spiritual. Every kid in the state, in the centres that support the sport and even where wrestling may not be that popular, loves feeling the soil on their body. They live to play the sport. In essence, it’s a part of Haryana’s soul.”
The women’s team reads like a rollcall of the new Haryana. Antim Panghal, 21, from Bhagana village in Hisar district, a farmer’s daughter competing in local dangals at ten, is now a two-time U-20 World Champion, the first Indian woman to win that title, and the heir apparent to Vinesh Phogat’s weight category. At the trials at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Stadium on May 30, she beat the very woman who had just knocked out the Olympian Phogat in the semis. Antim’s father, Ram Niwas Panghal, once rented a house in Hisar, so his daughter could commute 20 kilometres each way to training. “She wakes up at 4 am,” he said. “She practices twice a day, and she has never once complained.”
It is a story repeated in most families. It is also a paradox: Haryana has deep-seated patriarchal norms and a skewed sex ratio. But government crackdowns and community-led initiatives have, indirectly, used sport to shift something. There is enormous pride when a girl wins a bout. A medal can dismantle a generation of prejudice faster than a policy ever will.
Alongside Antim goes Manisha Bhanwala of Rohtak, a gold medallist at the 2025 Asian Championships; Mansi Ahlawat, also Rohtak, bronze medallist at the 2024 World Championships; Nisha Dahiya of Panipat, an Asian Championships silver medallist and Paris Olympian who overcame injuries that would have ended most careers; Priya Malik of Jind, a multiple junior World and Asian medallist; and Dipanshi, who earned the 50kg berth on domestic form. Six weight categories. Six Haryana girls.
On the men’s side, Olympic bronze medallist Aman Sehrawat, World No. 1 Sujeet Kalkal, and Asian Games silver medallist Deepak Punia head a freestyle unit of complete Haryana lineage. The Greco-Roman team, led by Sunil Kumar, mirrors the same geography.
To someone unfamiliar with India’s sporting topography, the statistics look fabricated. Haryana accounts for 2 percent of India’s population. It has contributed more than 30 percent of the country’s individual Olympic medals in history. At Tokyo 2020, 31 of India’s 126 athletes, nearly a quarter of the entire contingent, were from one state. In Paris, 24 of 117 athletes carried a Haryana address on their accreditation. When the Sports Minister says, ‘what's new, we just need to keep getting better,’ his confidence is not bluster.
Why?
Ask a Haryanvi and the answers come quickly: government incentives, a martial Jat tradition, a protein-rich dairy diet. All fair points. But Maharashtra and Punjab also have fertile agricultural lands, a physical culture, and government support. Neither sends eighteen wrestlers to an Asian Games.
“The true strength of Indian wrestling,” said Yogeshwar Dutt, Olympic bronze medallist at London 2012 and the sport’s most important ambassador, at his Rohtak academy earlier this year, “lies in the soil of the villages and the traditions of akhadas. When young athletes receive the right guidance, training, and opportunities, they emerge as champions who bring glory to the nation.”
The word soil is not a metaphor here. It carries weight. Discipline flows through the soil here and not through a stadium. In the village akharas, wrestlers still train on clay even as the national circuit moved to synthetic mats decades ago. The clay teaches balance, aggression, body intuition. A Haryana wrestler competes in roughly 60 bouts a year, the mud dangals alone delivering more competitive exposure than most national-level wrestlers from other states accumulate across their entire careers.
Looking at an akhara merely as a training facility is staring at the wrong end of the story. The akhara is a village ecosystem. A social institution. At Chandgi Ram Akhara in Sisai village, Hisar, named after the 1972 Olympian Master Chandgi Ram, who remains the village’s presiding deity, wrestlers eat together, sleep on mats in common rooms, wake before dawn and are shaped by coaches who make no salary from the state and charge no fees from families. Some akharas sit beside tubewell pumps, with wheat fields running flat to the horizon. For three generations, they have produced wrestlers. The density of these informal, community-funded, zero-cost institutions has no parallel in Indian sport.
“Other states don’t have the akhada tradition. So, they cannot produce at the speed at which Haryana does. But we haven’t tampered with the process. Didn’t bring in high-sounding ideas. Yes, modernisation is needed always. But passion is inborn,” says Olympian wrestler turned coach Gian Singh Sehrawat.
This is a standing rebuke to the infrastructure-first argument that Indian sports administration has held dear for twenty years: that you build the stadium first, and then the champion follows. Haryana’s wrestlers prove the opposite. The guru-shishya bond, both lathered in the same soil the guru once wrestled in, is a data transfer no biomechanics lab can replicate. At least, not spiritually.
“Haryana needs good coaches to bring more medals not only at AG but World Championships and Olympic Games. We don’t have good coaches. Coaches keep saying “pakdo, pakdo, pakdo.” I keep asking them “kya pakdo?” said Gian Singh.
“They say good players don’t often become good coaches. A few might not. But I believe, ‘good players can become good coaches because they understand the sport.”
The state government, wise and canny, understood this and built around it rather than replacing it. Since the early 2010s, Haryana has offered the most comprehensive athlete-welfare architecture in India: Olympic gold medallists receive 6 crore in prize money, a Class A government post, and a pension. Asian Games gold brings a Class B post. Medal winners at continental championships qualify for Class C. The policy is simple. Life-changing. For a family in a village where a government job is the ultimate social safety net, it transforms wrestling from a passion into a plan. Parents sit around akharas watching their kid’s train. If they are working, it is the grandfather who sits, watching, dreaming of Olympic glory for a grandchild he may not live to see on the podium. “That is exactly the culture,” as Yogeshwar Dutt puts it.
The competition inside Haryana is fierce in a way that has no domestic equivalent. The state trials are in effect an Olympic-grade bracket. The hype brings villages and towns together; think of the Jamaican Schools Athletics Championships, that hundred-year-old institution that produced Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser and turned sprinting into a national religion; in vehicles of every size and make, some arriving a day early. At last month’s women’s trials, Meenakshi Goyat, from Chabri village in Jind, had already beaten Vinesh Phogat, the most decorated Indian woman wrestler in history, before losing to Antim in the final. In men’s freestyle, a Haryana wrestler who cannot crack the state’s first-choice squad regularly transfers to another state. Third-string Haryana, as one coach famously noted, routinely beats the best that Maharashtra, UP, or Punjab can offer.
When Victor Wembanyama emerged from the Shaolin Temple after ten days, head shaved, body leaner, reportedly somewhere between NBA star and Buddhist monk, the world stood up and applauded. He had chosen discipline over comfort. Grit over glamour. And the sports world, unused to such voluntary austerity from its biggest stars, treated the gesture as extraordinary.
Wembanyama went to the monastery to find something extra. Haryana’s wrestlers are born inside one. Eighteen of them have just proven it, claimed every available slot on the national squad, and headed to the Asian Games from a state that has no modern infrastructure or hosted big tournaments, and no cricket team worth talking about. Only the soil. And the passion to wrestle with it.
As they say, wrestling Mitti (soil) Ka Game Hai. Haryana loves it Mitti (soil). We are born out of it. Will die in it. Somewhere in the middle, they also wrestle with it.
Shaolin should open that franchise. The waiting list would be long.
