The Mat Without Money: Pakistan Wrestles With a Fall Before the Olympics

In a training hall in Lahore, three names — Inayatullah, Abdullah, Mohammad Gulzar — still step onto the mat every morning. No scholarship. No overseas camp. Not a single Olympic medal in their pocket. They are still there, every day, because they believe Los Angeles 2028 belongs to them.

The Pakistan Wrestling Federation sent the Pakistan Sports Board a request: 30 million rupees, roughly 108,000 US dollars, for an entire Olympic preparation cycle. The answer was no. Last year, the federation received 3 million rupees. This year, not a single cent.

For an elite sports system, 108,000 dollars is a modest outlay. But the problem here is not scale. It lies in the fact that the system has quietly decided wrestling is not worth funding. And when a decision like that is made, it does not block one cycle — it blocks a generation.

From my first microphone to an empty stadium, I learned that sport speaks loudest when it is silent. In Pakistan, that silence has a name: a bank account at zero.

Context: four roads, no foot on any of them

Olympic wrestling, governed by United World Wrestling, is one of the oldest sports of the modern Games. Two disciplines — freestyle and Greco-Roman — share one philosophy: controlling an opponent's body on a mat through speed, technique and endurance. But in Pakistan, the distance between tradition and the Olympic stage is a chasm.

Qualification for Los Angeles 2028 opens four clear pathways: the World Championships, the UWW ranking series, the continental championships, and the Olympic qualifier. Four doors. But all four demand the same thing — plane tickets, hotels, and a camp long enough to bring a body to its peak.

Qualification begins in February 2027. From now until then, those three names need a multi-year technical build, not a short camp. Wrestling is a sport where reflexes are sharpened over thousands of hours on the mat; it does not forgive latecomers.

The federation understands this. It once planned to send its leading wrestlers to Kyrgyzstan — a genuine wrestling power in Central Asia, home to sparring partners of real quality. But the plan hinges on a single condition: airfare and accommodation. The six-month camp before the Nagoya Asian Games was cancelled for financial reasons. Kyrgyzstan is still waiting, and the federation is still searching.

This is the crux: the UWW qualification system is not broken. It runs exactly as designed. What is broken sits at the national institutional layer — the one that should have carried people to the door.

At the head of the federation is Mohammad Inam, a former beach wrestling world champion — a discipline recognised by UWW. That detail says nothing about the three wrestlers' chances in Los Angeles. But it says something about the leadership's credibility: the man at the top understands the mat from the inside, not from a chair.

Core: when the money chokes itself

Look at the financial structure of this programme. The first source is the state grant from the Pakistan Sports Board: 3 million rupees last year, nothing this year. The second is the Olympic Solidarity scholarship from the International Olympic Committee — a stream designed precisely for athletes in Pakistan's position, and in the current cycle, not one Pakistani wrestler received it. The third is commercial sponsorship, which the federation itself admits is difficult without major international medals. The fourth is the athletes' own pockets.

Four sources, and all four are blocked. But what matters more is how they are blocked.

Look at the loop. International medals are the precondition for sponsorship. But sponsorship — alongside state grants — is the precondition for international exposure. No money, no competition. No competition, no medals. No medals, no sponsors. A closed circle, and at its centre is an athlete standing still.

This is not Pakistan's fault alone. It is the common structure of every poor sporting nation. But one detail makes this case different, and it sits at the deepest layer of the story.

These wrestlers live off mud wrestling.

Let me be clear. The kushti and pehalwani tradition — wrestling in mud, in earth — is the cradle of South Asian wrestling. It produces strong, enduring men, and it feeds them. But mud wrestling rewards raw power. Wrestling on an Olympic mat rewards level-change speed, chain wrestling, and par-terre technique — the ground control that pins an opponent. Two different physical disciplines. Two different neuromuscular profiles.

And here is the most painful paradox: the survival economy is actively eroding the very Olympic pathway. Every hour of mud wrestling for a living is an hour not spent on the mat. Every injury in an earth bout with no referee, no doctor, is a step back from the Los Angeles dream. These athletes must earn a living in a physical discipline other than the one they most need to master.

That is a distortion of economics I have not seen anywhere else. It is not a shortage of money. It is money arriving from the wrong direction only.

I have sat through my own wrestling matches repeatedly, taking notes on every exchange, and one rule emerged: successful wrestling programmes all have a solid middle tier — a domestic competition system dense enough for athletes to mature before stepping onto the world stage. Pakistan once had that middle tier on a lower stage: the Commonwealth Games. At Birmingham 2026, Pakistani wrestlers won medals. That was evidence of a regional foundation — not Olympic standard, but a rung on the ladder.

Then that rung vanished. Wrestling was dropped from the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games programme. Just when Pakistan needed it most, its most accessible international stage closed. Two blows at once: a government funding stream gone, and an arena to prove ability gone.

I call that a negative feedback loop, not a one-off shock. Funding cuts lead to less international exposure, which leads to fewer medal prospects, which leads to less sponsorship, which leads to further cuts. The loop does not stop on its own.

The akhara tradition is a double-edged asset. It supplies a large, motivated talent pool and a culture of discipline deeply rooted in society. But it also shapes athletes into a physical profile — power over speed, endurance over agility — that is suboptimal for the Olympic mat. This is not the tradition's fault. It is the transition problem any sporting nation must solve when it steps from local competition to the world stage.

But among all these failures, one is the most overlooked, and also the easiest to fix: the Olympic Solidarity scholarship. This is a stream designed for exactly people like Inayatullah, Abdullah and Gulzar. It does not demand medals. It does not demand rankings. It demands a properly filed application. That no Pakistani wrestler received it suggests two possibilities: either the federation did not apply, or the candidates were not selected. Both are governance problems, and both are fixable — unlike raw funding scarcity.

In other words: what is missing is not only money. What is missing is the administrative capacity to reach money that already exists.

By global standards, 30 million rupees is a modest sum. Leading European and Central Asian wrestling programmes spend millions of dollars per cycle on a small group of athletes. That means Pakistan's barrier is not absolute financial impossibility. The barrier is political priority.

I know I am going against the majority here. The story being told is that the state abandons talent. That is a legitimate frame, and it is partly true. But it overlooks a more uncomfortable fact: the Pakistan Sports Board granting 3 million and then zero shows there is no stable funding formula for Olympic disciplines. This is not a one-year decision. It is the absence of a system.

And there is one more thing I must say, even if it is not easy to hear. The 30 million rupee figure was put forward by the federation itself. In negotiation language, that is an anchor, not an audited budget. The true minimum for preparation may be lower. That does not excuse the cut to zero. But it reminds me that every party in this story is playing a game of interests, and I should not read the first number as the final truth.

There is another layer nobody mentions, and it concerns the athletes themselves. Information shows the wrestlers' departments declined to provide financial support. That suggests these athletes were once employed by government departments or state enterprises — a legacy of Pakistan's departmental sports system. It means their income and training time may be entangled with non-sporting labour obligations. When the departments withdraw, they do not just lose money. They lose career stability too.

And here is what I want to stress: the biggest risk here is not injury. It is attrition. Wrestlers do not retire in one dramatic moment. They simply stop stepping onto the mat, a day at a time, until no one remembers their names. Before February 2027, the real danger is that these three names leave the Olympic pathway entirely — not because they lost a match, but because they never got to compete.

Contrarian: the Olympic dream may be the wrong goal

This is where I want to ask the hardest question. What if this entire community is chasing the wrong goal?

Look at reality. Pakistan has a deep-rooted wrestling culture, an abundant talent pool, and a mud-wrestling economy that feeds thousands. What it does not have — and may not have for decades — is the infrastructure to compete at Olympic level, where European and Central Asian programmes pour millions of dollars into each athlete.

So what if the goal were not an Olympic slot but a sustainable wrestling system? What if, instead of pouring scarce resources into a distant dream, people built a domestic league strong enough to retain talent, a stable middle tier, and let regional medals follow from there?

I may be wrong here. The Olympic dream has a power nothing can replace — it inspires, it attracts sponsorship, it forces governments to pay attention. Saying to abandon it is cold advice, and I am not sure I have the right to say it from a studio in Incheon, thousands of kilometres from Lahore.

But one thing I am certain of. If the goal is the Olympics, the road must begin with much smaller tasks: filing the scholarship application on time. Ensuring wrestlers are fed, rested, and medically cared for. Having a decent weight-management policy — because Olympic wrestling is notorious for extreme dehydration cuts, a genuine health risk nobody in this story mentions. And having a funding stream that does not evaporate next year.

Believing in a name before a match is a fan's habit; believing in the person after the match is my trade. And the people here, after everything, are three names training in 40-degree heat with nothing but belief.

Takeaway

A scrappy medal is still a medal, but it is the kind that needs a mirror. Pakistan does not need a miracle in Los Angeles. It needs a small decision, repeated consistently: money that does not disappear, an application that gets filed, an arena that gets kept.

If Inayatullah, Abdullah and Mohammad Gulzar reach the February 2027 qualifier with even a little real preparation, that is already a victory — the kind that needs no applause, only for those inside to know they did not give up. The remaining question is not for them. It is for the people in the meeting room, pen in hand, deciding whether the mat gets rolled out again.