Hetal Dave has no teammates or fellow female sumo wrestlers with whom to practice.
MUMBAI, India — At 5-foot-7 and 165 pounds, Hetal Dave is strong and sturdy but far from obese. She is perhaps not what you first think of when you hear: India's only female sumo wrestler.
But that she is.
It's just one of the many things that distinguishes Hetal among the women in her family. Unlike her mother and her grandmother, both of whom were married before they were 20, 23-year-old Hetal is unmarried and attending college.
She comes from a conservative family of Brahmins, a Hindu caste associated with priests and scholars — not fighters. But when she was 6, Hetal’s father decided she should learn martial arts to gain physical and mental strength. He enrolled her in a judo class.
“I think the girls should be self-confident,” said her father Sudhir as he sat in the family’s modest apartment in South Mumbai. “If she walks on the road, she doesn’t have to bother. She is ready to face anything.”
As a young athlete, Hetal was not exceptionally skilled or talented, but she proved to be extremely hardworking, said her coach since childhood, Cawas Billimoria, who has represented India in judo at the Olympics.
“If I ever asked her, ‘Hetal, are you tired? Should we stop?’ she would never say ‘Yes,’” Billimoria said as Hetal and her brother practiced wrestling on nearby mats one recent Sunday morning. “[She was] always willing to go on. Sometimes to the point where you want to say, ‘Please, I want to pack up!’ ”
Billimoria became a role model to her, and Hetal — wanting to explore a sport relatively unknown in India — began sumo wrestling in 2007.
She has since traveled to Estonia, Taiwan and Poland representing India in global sumo competitions. At the recent Sumo World Championships in Warsaw, she placed 5th in the women’s middleweight category. In a video of the competition on her camera, Hetal stands in a small ring wearing a black top, stretch pants and a large white belt, called a mawashi.
Hetal does not try to gain weight, and she does not take any dietary supplements. She said she eats whatever her mother cooks for the family, which tends to be traditional Indian dishes like rice, dal, vegetables or dosas. The family practices strict vegetarianism and abstains from eating meat or egg products. She allows herself the occasional junk food, like a McAloo Tikki veggie burger from McDonald’s.
“I don’t need to eat to build strength in me,” Hetal said. Like all serious athletes, Hetal has a strict practice regimen — four hours a day of cardio and technique exercises.
But unlike other athletes, Hetal has no teammates or fellow female sumo wrestlers with whom to practice. Nor does she have a sumo ring. Instead, she and her younger brother, who also trains in judo and sumo wrestling, head out to a large lawn in South Mumbai and wrestle together.
She said she has tried to recruit female friends to wrestle, but they have all backed out. They say they don't like wearing the big bulky belt, but Hetal says she thinks it's because they have not had the strong family support she has had.
“It doesn’t look good,” Hetal said, “but you’re not playing it to look good.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/101223/sumo-wrestling-indian-women-sports
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