Thirty Million Rupees and an Empty Mat: Pakistan Wrestling Grapples With Itself Before Los Angeles 2028

On the outskirts of Lahore, at around five in the morning, people dig a trench some fifteen metres long and pour in water and mud until the mixture thickens like cold porridge. A crowd gathers in a circle, drums quicken, and two bare-chested men charge at each other in the mud. The bout lasts only a few minutes. The winner takes a fistful of cash, sometimes just enough to feed a family for three days. This is kushti, the traditional wrestling of the Punjab, the thing that has raised thousands of children on nothing but their own strength.

A few kilometres away, inside a covered training hall, a wrestling mat built to Olympic standard lies rolled up in a corner. No one is grappling on it. Not because there are no athletes. Pakistan has a generation of young wrestlers that people inside the sport regard as promising. It is because there is no money to send them to international competition, the only place where strength can be turned into a ticket to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

I have followed many small sporting nations as they struggled with the budget question. But Pakistan's story contains a detail that made me stop and take notes very slowly: this year, the amount the state sports body allocated to Olympic wrestling is zero. Not reduced. Not delayed. Nothing at all.

The break is not in the figure itself; it is in the absence of any mechanism guaranteeing that the figure survives two consecutive budget seasons. That is the kind of signal I learned to listen for across thirty-eight years of holding a pen, and after a few costly mistakes I will describe later.

A tradition that lacks not people, but a road

Pakistan is no stranger to wrestling. On the contrary, it is one of the oldest cradles of the sport on earth. Kushti, also known as pehalwani, has existed on this subcontinent for centuries, bound to the akhara — the open-air training pits where men train in earth, sweat and mustard oil. The akhara system produces a class of athlete with a formidable physical base, forged from childhood, eating and sleeping under a harsh discipline.

That very cradle is why today's story hurts more than usual. A country with a wrestling tradition this deep ought to be a regular presence at international arenas. And to a degree, it is. At the Birmingham 2026 Commonwealth Games, Pakistani wrestlers won medals, confirming a competitive base at regional level. Those medals are not trivial. They prove that talent exists, that the training system rooted in the akhara still has life.

But there is a gap outsiders often fail to see. The depth of wrestling at the Commonwealth Games is far below the depth of wrestling at the Olympics. A Commonwealth medal is a real achievement, but it does not translate directly into an Olympic berth. Between those two rungs lies a void of opposition, of intensity, of the number of world-class athletes a wrestler must face every month.

The governance structure of Pakistani wrestling sits in four tiers. At the top is the International Olympic Committee and United World Wrestling, known as UWW. Below that come continental and regional competitions. Then comes the Pakistan Wrestling Federation, the PWF, currently led by Mohammad Inam. And at the bottom sits the funding body of the state, the Pakistan Sports Board, the PSB.

Mohammad Inam is not an anonymous official. He was once a world champion in beach wrestling, a discipline officially recognised by UWW. That a former world champion heads the federation is a positive signal on the sporting side. But the personal standing of a leader does not automatically convert into money in a budget. And that is precisely the bottleneck.

In a recent statement, the PWF said it had requested 30 million rupees in support. That figure is the budget the federation considers necessary to send wrestlers to international competition, to organise overseas camps and to prepare for qualification. But the Pakistan Sports Board granted only 3 million rupees last year, and zero this year.

Three million against thirty million is one tenth. Zero against three million is a disappearance. Across two consecutive budget seasons, the level of support has fallen from meagre to nothing.

Four doors and one locked key

There is a common misunderstanding I encounter in many small sporting nations: people assume there is no route to the Olympics. With Pakistani wrestling, that is not true. The UWW qualification system for Los Angeles 2028 is open and clearly defined. There are four routes.

The first route is the World Championships. This is the main door, for those strong enough to claim a berth directly. The second is the UWW ranking series, where wrestlers accumulate points across a year of tournaments. The third is the Continental Championships. And the fourth is the Olympic qualifier, the final tournament for those still without a place.

All four routes share one unavoidable feature: each requires international travel. No route leads to the Olympics from a training hall in Lahore. To collect ranking points, you must fly to Europe, Asia, the Americas. To enter a continental qualifier, you must reach the host city. To enter a world event, you must be there with your luggage, your coach, your doctor and your food and lodging paid for.

That is why the PSB's zero is not an abstract piece of bad news. It is a door locked from the outside. The four doors still exist, the hinges remain, but no one holds the key.

The calendar makes everything more severe. Qualification for Los Angeles 2028 begins in February 2027. From this point, only a short window remains to prepare. And for a wrestler, that window cannot be bridged by willpower. It requires a multi-year technical pathway, not a short camp thrown together in a hurry.

The problem is not that Pakistan has no road to the Olympics. The problem is that Pakistan has a road, has people to walk it, but has no money to buy the ticket.

The story of the overseas camp makes this clear. Ahead of the Asian Games in Nagoya, the PWF planned to send its leading wrestlers abroad for a six-month camp. The plan never materialised because of a lack of funds. Six months of training against international-class opponents shrank to nothing. This is not a matter of missing one trip. It is a matter of losing one development cycle.

The federation then turned to another option: cooperation with Kyrgyzstan. This is a sensible choice on sporting grounds. Kyrgyzstan is a genuine wrestling power in Central Asia, producing wrestlers of world class. Training alongside Kyrgyz wrestlers would bring a quality of opposition Pakistan cannot find at home.

But that plan still hangs in the air. It depends on whether someone pays for the airfare and accommodation. A federation without three million rupees in its budget cannot fund an international camp on its own. The idea is right, but the means are absent.

The self-blocking circle

The economics of Pakistani Olympic wrestling have a structure I call the self-blocking circle. It works like this: to attract a sponsor, you need a major international medal. To win a major international medal, you need international competition. To get international competition, you need money. To get money, you need a sponsor.

The PWF states this plainly in its own words: it is very difficult to find sponsors without a major international medal. That is an honest admission, but it is also a sentence. The circle does not break itself. It can only be broken from outside, by a source of money not tied to results — meaning state money or funding from International Olympic Committee support programmes.

And here is the most striking detail, and the least discussed. In the current cycle, not a single Pakistani wrestler received a scholarship from the IOC's Olympic Solidarity programme. That programme is designed precisely for athletes in Pakistan's position: people with potential but without resources, who need support to train and compete.

The absence of any awarded scholarship may have two causes. One is that the federation did not apply. The other is that it applied but was not selected. Both possibilities point in the same direction: a gap in administrative capacity, not merely in money.

When a programme is designed to help exactly the people who need help, and those people receive nothing, the problem lies at the application stage, not at the selection stage.

I have seen this kind of failure in many places. Small federations often run on thin administrative staff, without enough people to chase the complex paperwork of international bodies. They lose money not because they are ineligible, but because they do not know how to claim it. That is a different kind of poverty — a poverty of institutional capacity.

At the same time, wrestling was removed from the competition programme of the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games. This is an event outside Pakistan, decided by the Commonwealth Games Federation. But the consequences for Pakistan are direct. The Commonwealth Games were once their mid-tier international rung — where young wrestlers could test themselves, win medals and build experience before stepping onto the Olympic stage. Lose that rung, and the development path is cut in the middle.

Two events occurred at once: the state cut the money, and an international arena vanished. These are not two difficulties added together. They are two difficulties multiplied.

The paradox of the mud pit

This is the part that made me think longest, and the part I believe contains the deepest truth of the story.

Pakistani wrestlers earn a living by wrestling in mud. The bouts in the mud pit, at festivals, in villages, bring them income. It is the only stream of money actually flowing into their pockets. But that very stream is quietly destroying their Olympic road.

The reason lies in a difference of physical profile. Mud wrestling rewards raw power. Standing in mud, you cannot move quickly. The mud sucks at your feet. The bout becomes a contest of force, of the ability to throw an opponent down with muscle mass. The stronger, heavier, denser man usually wins.

Wrestling on an Olympic mat demands a completely different neuromuscular profile. It rewards the speed of changing levels. It rewards chaining moves — switching from one technique to another in an instant. It rewards par-terre technique, ground wrestling, where you control an opponent with holds and points. On the mat, the faster, the more skilled, the better-timed man usually wins, not the strongest.

An athlete raised in the mud pit, whose entire reflex system was forged in the mechanics of force, carries a body unsuited to the mat. He must relearn how to move, how to distribute weight, how to think about distance. That is a physical rebuild, not a training session.

In Pakistan, the economy of survival and the economy of achievement are pulling in opposite directions: the mud pit feeds the wrestler, but it also forges in him exactly the body the Olympic mat does not need.

This is where I want to pause and be clear, because it is easily misread. Mud wrestling is not the enemy. It is tradition, identity, a source of life. If anyone proposed banning it to force wrestlers onto the mat, the result would be the opposite: athletes would lose income, leave the sport, and Pakistan would lose both the cradle and the ladder.

The paradox lies there. What sustains is what obstructs. What obstructs is what cannot be abandoned. To solve this, an alternative income stream tied to the Olympic path must be created — state money, scholarships, or sponsorship tied to the training cycle. Without that replacement, every call to focus on the Olympics is empty talk.

Three names appear in this story: Inayatullah, Abdullah and Mohammad Gulzar. They are the wrestlers the federation treats as pillars for the Los Angeles 2028 campaign. About them, I must be honest: no performance data has been published. No weight classes, no UWW ranking, no continental or world results, no ages, no injury history. That is a worrying information void, because without data, every claim of potential is belief, not analysis.

What the budget sheet does not say

Now I want to talk about my own mistake, because it bears directly on how I read this story.

In 2026, a television station in Chengdu sent me to Russia to follow Croatia at the World Cup. Before their semi-final against England, I wrote a two-thousand-word analysis insisting Croatia would lose on fitness. Eight of their pillars were over thirty. They had played three extra periods. To me at the time, those numbers were a biological verdict.

They won 2-1, with 58 percent possession. Over the following month, I sat through every reel of Croatia's matches and logged 214 set-piece situations. I realised they had deliberately slowed the game in extra time to save energy. The data I needed lay in the tempo, not in the minutes. I read the numbers and ignored the rhythm.

I trusted the math before I trusted the pitch; that was the most expensive mistake of my career.

That lesson haunts me to this day, as I sit reading the Pakistani wrestling budget sheet. Because here, too, there is an appealing equation: 30 million rupees, roughly 108,000 US dollars at a recent reference exchange rate, to be compared with other sporting nations. And that equation leads to a very comfortable conclusion: the sum is small, so the problem is only money, and with money everything will be fine.

I do not believe that conclusion. Thirty million rupees is indeed a small amount by global Olympic preparation standards. But precisely because it is small, its absence becomes harder to understand. A country that can spend on many other things, yet cannot spend the equivalent of 108,000 dollars on an Olympic sport, has a barrier that does not lie in its pocket. It lies in its order of priorities.

That is the counter-intuitive point I want to stress. People tend to think the barrier for poor sport is poverty. Yes, poverty is part of it. But the deeper barrier is a system without a stable allocation formula. When funding moves from 3 million to zero in two years, what is destroyed is not just one year's budget. What is destroyed is the ability to plan across years.

A wrestler needs to know he will have a six-month camp next year, that he will go to three ranking events over two years, that a pathway exists. When the money can vanish at any moment, no one dares commit to anything. A coach dares not set a long-term plan. An athlete dares not turn down a paid mud bout to save himself for the mat.

In other words, uncertainty kills a sport more effectively than scarcity. A steady three million rupees a year is more useful than thirty million that appears once and disappears.

There is another layer of information I can only infer, and I say clearly that this is inference. The story says the athletes' own "departments" also declined financial support. That phrasing suggests an older employment system: athletes were once taken on by state departments or state enterprises, drawing salaries and training alongside. When those departments stopped supporting them, it meant an entire traditional funding channel was drying up.

That is a broader symptom of shrinking public spending on sport. And it hints at another risk for the wrestlers: if their very employment depends on departments now struggling, their job security is precarious too.

The same outcome, and insiders and outsiders are watching two different matches. The outsider looks and sees a story about money. The insider — the wrestlers, coaches, federation officials — lives inside a story about time, about lost development cycles, about chances that never come back.

The silence before February 2027

I still remember how I began my career. In 2026, I worked as a reporter in Australia, then moved to Vietnam. Back then I wrote from direct observation, noting every training session, every conversation. That discipline has followed me all my life.

In 2026, when digital sports media exploded, a young blogger spread false news that the third-tier club Sichuan Longfor had gone bankrupt, based on a photo of an empty training ground. I had attended twenty-three live training sessions and knew the club had just signed a sponsorship deal worth 2.8 million yuan. I wrote a rebuttal. It was printed three days later and drew only 1,200 reads. For the first time I saw my own caution about verification become a weakness in the news race.

Fake news does not die because people stop believing it, but because people stop verifying. And in the Pakistani wrestling story, what I try to do is verify — to separate what is fact, what is claim, what is expectation.

The three names Inayatullah, Abdullah, Mohammad Gulzar are facts. They exist, they are pillars named by the federation. But the claim that "we have a batch of wrestlers who can qualify" is a statement without data behind it. There is no record to check. And from my experience following matches, a statement without data is only a hope spoken more loudly than usual.

In 2026, when the pandemic halted every competition, I was forty-eight and fell into anxiety. With no new matches to watch, I dug through the archive of the Chinese national team from 2026 to 2026. I found a pattern: when possession rose by more than 12 percent in the first half, the second-half loss rate was 71 percent, or seven in ten matches. The series "Numbers That Weep" drew 60,000 reads, and Chengdu Rongcheng itself approached me as an informal consultant.

From that emptiness, I found my only anchor: historical data. And applied to Pakistani wrestling, the historical data tells me one clear thing. The Commonwealth medals are real, but they belong to a tier of competition lower than the Olympics. The leap from there to an Olympic berth is a large one, and that leap needs time, opposition and money — three things the current cycle lacks all of.

Between two rolling balls there is a silence that holds the entire truth. In wrestling, that silence is the moment between the starting whistle and the first contact — where two wrestlers read each other, probe each other, decide who sets the rhythm. In Pakistan right now, that silence stretches from now to February 2027. And within it, no drum is beating.

Signals to watch

I do not write to predict the outcome. I write to point out the signals those inside the sport should watch, because after the Croatia lesson of 2026, every prediction I make must carry a section titled "the conditions under which I may be wrong."

The first signal is the next allocation decision by the Pakistan Sports Board. If next year's figure is still zero, the Los Angeles 2028 cycle is effectively closed before it opens. If the figure returns at a few million rupees, at least the pathway is not severed entirely.

The second signal is the appearance of an Olympic Solidarity scholarship application. If a Pakistani wrestler receives one in the coming cycle, that is a sign the administrative gap is being filled. If again there is none, the problem is not only money.

The third signal is the Kyrgyzstan camp. If it becomes reality, Pakistan will have a Central Asian technical current flowing into its system — one of the best sources of opposition it can reach.

The fourth signal, and the most structural, is whether wrestling returns to the Commonwealth Games programme. If not, a mid-tier international rung will be lost for a long time, and the path from the akhara to the Olympic mat will be missing a link.

I have lived through many Olympic cycles and learned one thing about small sporting nations. They do not collapse in a single day. They collapse in silence, across budget seasons no one notices, across cancelled camps no one reports, across athletes who quietly leave the mat to earn a living somewhere else. When the news finally arrives, it is too late to do anything.

Pakistani wrestling is at exactly that silent moment. The thirty million rupees have not been granted. The mat is still rolled up in the corner. Three names still wait for a pathway. And the clock counting down to February 2027 keeps running, steadily, indifferent to who has money and who does not.

I am old now, but my beat is still twenty. And that beat tells me the most worrying thing is not that Pakistan may fail to qualify for the Olympics. The most worrying thing is that they may never get the chance to try.