Sakshi Malik avoided wearing anything that bared her arms: ‘I complain to God…’

Sakshi Malik, India’s Olympic bronze medal-winning wrestler, opened up about being conscious of her body shape, which underwent many changes due to a rigorous training regime and diet. In her memoir ‘Witness’, co-authored by sports journalist Jonathan Selvaraj, Sakshi said she was so conscious of her muscular arms that she avoided wearing sleeveless dresses.
“The one style of clothing I avoided wearing was anything that bared my arms. I was always conscious that I had very muscular, 14-inch-thick biceps. They were prominent even by wrestling standards and they looked massive in comparison to the arms of the skinny girls I’d see on film sets in Mumbai. I always felt my arms and hands looked weird. They looked like what I thought men’s arms and hands did,” she wrote.
Sakshi, who won bronze in women’s 58kg wrestling at the Rio Olympics in 2016, explained how a female wrestler’s body can be different from most women’s bodies. “Our wrestler bodies are built very different from most women’s bodies. We develop very strong muscles in our arms and back, thanks to all the rope climbs and pull-ups, while our waist is naturally very narrow, since we have to maintain a low body-fat percentage. It’s the combination of the two that gives us that characteristic V-shaped upper body, like that of boys.
“While all women wrestlers have torsos with some definition, it’s less prominent for some. Vinesh has more of what we consider a typically feminine body shape. Her cousins Sangeeta and Geeta too don’t have very prominent V-shaped torsos. They both have heavier hips and relatively leaner arms. That wasn’t the case with me,” Sakshi wrote.
One of the three faces – Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia being the others – of the wrestlers’ protest, Sakshi narrated how she often received comments from fellow wrestlers about her broad arms.
“I often wished I had more of what we consider a girly shape. As a teenager, I’d sometimes complain to God, “You gave me such a good body, but did you have to give me such big arms?”
“It didn’t help my self-image much either when other girls at the wrestling camp would comment on my arms. They’d say I had such heavy arms that I’d be able to exhaust my opponents by just hand-wrestling them (chala chala ke behosh kar denge). It wasn’t just Indians. Once when I was overseas at a training camp, an Italian wrestler pointed to my arms and gave me a big thumbs-up, saying “Hey big arms!”
“He actually meant it as a compliment, but I felt very awkward about it. My arms were indeed perfect for wrestling, but they didn’t make me feel very feminine. I didn’t feel confident at all about how I looked,” Sakshi added.