In a rather unfortunate moment on the opening day of Wrestling action at the 2022 Commonwealth Games CWG), the Wrestling events at the Birmingham games had to be stopped for an hour due to security issues at the venue. According to multiple media reports, the stoppage occured due to a speaker falling down from the ceiling at the Coventry Arena in Coventry.
Wrestling is one of the key showcase events at the CWG with a total of 13 Gold Medals available with the men and women set to fight it out in seven different weight categories each. For India, it is the discipline that is expected to bring a big haul of medals and in shooting’s absence could be the one with the biggest medal haul.
The entire Wrestling event will be concluded over two days -Friday (August 5) and Saturday (August 6). However, the start of events did not go according to plan. After the speaker’s fall, the organisers decided to re-check the entire system in order to check for any faults and prevent the incident from repeating.
“All are safe, they are just rechecking the whole system to avoid any untoward incident,” a coach was quoted saying to News agency PTI. “We’re taking a short pause for a safety check and will resume action once we receive the go-ahead,” said Union World Wrestling on their Twitter account.
The event was supposed to resume at 5:15 PM IST but there was a further delay after that. Before the abrupt halt, two Indian wrestlers -Bajrang and Deepak Punia registered comfortable victories in their bout. Apart from these two; Mohit Grewal, Anshu Malik, Sakshi Malik, Divya Kakran are also in action.
So far, India have a total of 20 medals to their name in CWG 2022. The country’s tally includes 6 Golds alongside 7 silver and bronze medals. The most medals have come from Weightlifting.
