🇮🇳 Vinesh Phogat

She was born in Balali, a village in Charkhi Dadri district of Haryana, to Rajpal Singh Phogat and Premlata Phogat. Her father — Mahavir Singh Phogat's younger brother — died when she was nine. Her uncle Mahavir, then training his own daughters Geeta and Babita on a mud akhada behind their house, took over Vinesh's training at age ten. She was, in the family memory, the most stubborn of the Phogat cousins on the akhada.

She won the gold at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow 2014 at age 19, and again at Gold Coast 2018, and again at Birmingham 2022. She won the Asian Games gold at Jakarta 2018 — the first Indian woman to win an Asian Games wrestling gold — and bronze at the World Wrestling Championships in 2019 and 2022.

Rio 2016 ended in a quarter-final injury — a torn anterior cruciate ligament against the Chinese Sun Yanan, twenty-five seconds before the bell. She required reconstructive surgery and was out for many months. Tokyo 2020 ended in the round of 16 against the eventual silver medallist; she was knocked out by a 'fitness lapse', as the federation report later termed it.

The 2023 federation protest is the political turn of the career. She, with the wrestlers Bajrang Punia, Sakshi Malik and Sangeeta Phogat, sat at Jantar Mantar in Delhi from January through May 2023 demanding the resignation of WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh on allegations of sexual harassment from women wrestlers. The protest involved a sit-in dispersal, a Yamuna-side medal-immersion threat, and a Supreme Court direction that the Delhi Police file an FIR. Brij Bhushan stepped aside from the federation later that year.

Paris 2024 was the redemption arc — Susaki beaten in the round of 16, three more wins, a semi-final win over Cuba's Guzman that put her in the final, then the 100-gram disqualification on the morning of the final. The Court of Arbitration for Sport refused her appeal for a joint silver in the days that followed. She retired from wrestling on 8 August 2024 with an Instagram post.

She joined the Indian National Congress within weeks of the retirement and contested the Haryana legislative assembly seat of Julana on a Congress ticket. She won the seat in October 2024 — her first political race, won in her village constituency. She is now a serving MLA in Haryana.

She is married to Somvir Rathee, a fellow wrestler and railway employee, since December 2018. They live in Charkhi Dadri. Vinesh, in her retirement post, wrote in Hindi that her mother, wrestling, and she — the three of them — had won and lost together.