In June, Sinthia Rose will sit opposite a 65-kilogramme Uzbek woman and try to wrestle her. The 21-year-old has a firm grip and steady eye. Indeed, she hopes to bring back gold at the Asian Arm-wrestling Championship, buoyed by the pride of representing Pakistan as a Christian at an international event.
“Arm-wrestling is a new sport for us but I take it very seriously,” she recently told The Express Tribune from her Liaquatabad home. She tried to excel in other athletics and took part in throwball, long jump and basketball events but feels there is no scope in them. “I believe that arm-wrestling has a future.”
She and 300 others. They were scheduled to take part in the All Sindh Arm-Wrestling Championship 2013 before the elections but the event was postponed over bloodshed in Karachi.
Patience, however, is one of Rose’s techniques even though a match lasts just four to five minutes. The game is about patience rather than being on the offensive, as her coach Nayab Malik taught her.
“We need to keep eye contact so that we can read the other’s move,” Rose says. “Sometimes we just hold our opponent’s move for more than a minute so that they get tired, or till their hand starts to ache.” Only after exhausting the opponent does she make her move.
The second rule is that the fight is about subtlety instead of the strength. “We have to hold the hand at an 80-degree angle and pull our competitor’s hand towards us slowly,” she says. “If that isn’t done correctly, the game is over.” This technique is called ‘go’ and it is all about how you approach the opponent and direct their own strength against them. “I wouldn’t give away my own force into one match,” she adds. Her longest matches have lasted for five minutes and the shortest less than 30 seconds.
Rose abides by these rules for the game and in life. And they seem to have worked for her. In her two-year career, she has so far won two Sindh Games gold medals, a Karachi Games gold medal and the 65-kg title at the National Games last year.
“I’ve always been good at sports, but I also believe that [you] can only excel in any field if [you] enjoy it,” she explains. However, she adds that arm-wrestling is the most fun and the easiest sport for women who have already tried their hand at athletics or other sports and failed to make a mark.
The beginnings
When Rose was competing in another event at the Sindh Sports Board she found that other athletes were switching to arm-wrestling, which piqued her interest. Today, she and her sister Amniks (also a 45-kilogramme gold medalist) practice at the board every day with their coach Nayab Malik, who introduced them to the sport. She reinforces these practise sessions with a balanced diet of three meals a day and never skips breakfast. It was especially after her FSc at a convent boarding school in Gujranwala this year that Rose’s ambitions grew to really make a name for herself.
She will be training with 37 other women for the Asian Arm-Wrestling Championship, according to coach Malik, who also manages the national arm-wrestling team. More women are now keen on it because it helps change perceptions. The training sessions are more like a community gathering in which each woman comes with experience from her former discipline.
For Rose, though, it was not a feminist cause that made her roll up her sleeves. It was a personal struggle. “I remember that all the fear and the hesitation was coming from within me, others really didn’t care,” she says. “I’d lose the matches in the beginning because I thought it would look odd as a woman. But then I got over my own chauvinism.” She sometimes practises with her elder brother now. And her father, a tailor who has funded her education with his income from the business, watched her compete at the nationals. “It took them some time to get used to the idea but they enjoy it now.”
Courtesy of: Express Tribune Magazine