Nur-Sultan (Kazakhstan), Sept 22:
Rahul Aware won the biggest medal of his career by bagging a bronze while an injured Deepak Punia settled for a silver after pulling out of the final as India celebrated its best-ever performance at the World Wrestling Championship here today
Aware outclassed Tyler Lee Graff, the 2017 Pan- America champion, 11-4 in the 61kg bronze play-off to take India’s tally to five medals.
Deepak, the reigning junior world champion did not take mat against Iranian great Hasan Yazdani due to an ankle injury, sustained during the semi-final.
The other medal winners in this edition are Bajrang Punia, Ravi Dahiya and Vinesh Phogat.
India’s previous best show was at the 2013 edition, when the country had won three medals through Amit Dahiya (silver), Bajrang Punia (bronze) and Sandeep Tulsi Yadav (bronze in Greco-Roman)
Winning gold medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games was 27-year-old Aware’s best performance before.
Aware had shown early promise when he won bronze medals at the Asian Championships in 2009 and 2011 but suddenly vanished from the scene after that.
For the record, the greatest ever Maharashtrian wrestler undoubtedly is late KD Jadhav, who won independent India’s first individual medal, a bronze in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
The morning of the final day of the championships brought with it the news that Deepak will not be able to compete in Sunday’s final.
had come out of the mat limping and a swollen right eye after his semifinal against Switzerland’s Stefan Reichmuth.
It was a good draw for Deepak and he exploited it to get the biggest medal of his career.
In a dream run, Deepak reached the final with wins over Reichmuth, Colombia’s Carlos Arturo Mendez and Kazakhstan’s Adilet Davlumbayev. He became only the fifth Indian ever to reach the World Championship final after Bishamber Singh (1967) Sushil Kumar (2010), Amit Dahiya (2013) and Bajrang Punia (2018). Only last year he had won the junior world championship.
Sushil Kumar remains India’s only World Champion. He had won a gold in 2010 in Moscow. (PTI)
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