Pakistan, LA 2028 and the Takedown into the Void: When the State Returns Zero, Wrestlers Still Have to Live off Mud

Last month, at two in the morning in Incheon, I sat in front of a screen rewatching a phone-shot video sent from Punjab. Three men — Inayatullah, Abdullah, Mohammad Gulzar — were wrestling on a faded mat in a room with no air conditioning. Outside it was 44 degrees Celsius. Inside, they were preparing for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic qualifiers, which begin in February 2027. At the same moment, the Pakistan Wrestling Federation received from the Pakistan Sports Board its funding allocation for this year: zero.

This is the second time in two consecutive years I have watched a national wrestling federation abandoned at the most important moment of the Olympic cycle. Last year they received three million rupees. This year, the figure fell to zero. The federation asked for thirty million rupees. The gap between what they need and what they receive is not a crack. It is a canyon. And inside that canyon, three athletes are wrestling in the dark, waiting for a ticket their system has no money to buy.

They can lock the arena doors, but no one can lock the pen. For me, that line has held true since 2026, when I was barred from the World Cup in Russia for writing that tiki-taka never lived at knockout level. But it holds even more true for the Pakistan story, where the doors were not merely locked — they were taken off their hinges, and no one bothered to rehang them.

Context: a long wrestling tradition stuck between two centuries

Pakistan is no stranger to wrestling. On the contrary, it is one of the cradles of South Asian traditional wrestling — kushti, pehalwani, an akhara (wrestling pit) culture centuries old, where men grow up on clay, mustard oil, and bouts in mud pits. That culture produces a stream of athletes with raw power, extraordinary endurance, and an almost unteachable instinct for absorbing pain.

But here is the point I want you to hold onto, because it is the axis of the entire story: the raw power of mud does not translate to the Olympic mat. Olympic wrestling — both freestyle and Greco-Roman, governed by United World Wrestling (UWW) — is a speed sport, not a strength sport. It rewards the ability to change levels in an instant, chain wrestling, par-terre technique — ground wrestling — and hip agility. A good mud wrestler can crush an opponent with weight and drag. A good mat wrestler wins by vanishing from the point of contact just as the opponent commits force.

In other words, Pakistan has the raw material but lacks the furnace to transform it. And that furnace — in every Olympic sport — is run on money.

Historically, Pakistan has had a respectable regional wrestling base. At the 2026 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, Pakistani wrestlers brought home medals — a sign that talent at the regional tier is real, not an empty claim. But that is exactly the problem: the Commonwealth is a tier far shallower than the Olympics. Between a Commonwealth medal and an Olympic berth lies a gap that cannot be filled with words of encouragement.

And then, like a blow to the knee just as you are bracing, wrestling was removed from the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games program. The mid-tier international stage — the rung between domestic competition and Olympic qualification — vanished. Pakistan lost both a government funding window and a proving ground in the same period.

I have followed South Asian wrestling bouts for over four decades, from indoor events in Vietnam to training sessions in Incheon. And there is a law I have never seen broken: no nation has ever built an Olympic wrestling program on talent alone. Every one of them needed money to buy international exposure — camps, sparring against world-class opponents. Talent decides where you start. Money decides where you finish.

Core: dissecting a system strangling itself

The funding architecture: three tiers, and all three are leaking

To understand why this story is more serious than an ordinary funding appeal, you have to look at the funding structure of Pakistani Olympic sport. There are three tiers, and I will take them one by one, like dissecting a wrestling move.

The first tier is the state, specifically the Pakistan Sports Board (PSB). This is the primary source of money, and it has just collapsed. Last year, the PSB transferred three million rupees to the Pakistan Wrestling Federation. This year, the figure is zero. The federation submitted a budget requesting thirty million rupees — ten times what it had ever received. That figure is no accident. Thirty million rupees, converted at roughly 278 rupees to the US dollar, equals about 108,000 US dollars. By global Olympic-preparation standards, that is a modest sum to the point of near triviality. European wrestling federations spend millions of euros per cycle on video analysis and rehabilitation alone. The Pakistani figure, by world standards, is pocket change.

This is why I must say it plainly: the barrier here is not absolute financial impossibility, but political priority. Thirty million rupees is a sum any government could find if it wanted to. That they did not find it means they did not want to. And that is a far harder truth to swallow than mere lack of money.

The second tier is the international source, specifically the International Olympic Committee's Olympic Solidarity scholarships. This is the wound I consider the most overlooked in the entire story. Olympic Solidarity scholarships are designed precisely for athletes in Pakistan's position — those with talent whose nation cannot afford them. In the current cycle, not one Pakistani wrestler received one. Not one.

Let me stress the meaning of that. This is not the state lacking money. This is an international funding source, designed to compensate for the state lacking money, failing to reach those who need it most. There are two possibilities: either the Pakistan Wrestling Federation did not apply, or the Pakistani candidates were not selected. Both are governance problems, not money problems. And governance problems can be fixed — financial poverty is much harder.

The third tier is corporate sponsorship. This tier strangles itself. The federation admits that finding sponsors is "difficult without major international medals." Read that sentence slowly, because it contains the whole tragedy. A major international medal is the precondition for sponsorship. But sponsorship — along with state money — is the precondition for the international exposure needed to win a medal. This is a death loop: no medal, no money; no money, no medal.

Here is the crux: the economics of the Pakistan wrestling program are circular and self-defeating. It does not fail because of an event; it fails because of its structure.

Four roads to LA 2028 — and why all four are blocked

Now let us talk about the road to the finish. What is remarkable is that the Olympic wrestling qualification system is not deadlocked. UWW designed four clear paths to a Los Angeles 2028 berth:

First, the World Championships — the harshest stage, where you must stand among the leaders.

Second, the UWW Rankings Series — a points system that lets athletes build standing across events.

Third, the Continental Championships — the most feasible path for Asian nations.

Fourth, the Olympic Qualifier — the final door, where all remaining hope is staked.

Four roads. It sounds very democratic. The problem is that all four share one precondition: you have to go. You have to board a plane, appear abroad, pay for a hotel, eat, train. The qualification system is working exactly as designed — the problem lies in Pakistan's institutional layer, which cannot deliver the inputs needed to use it.

This is what I want you to see clearly. No one is banning Pakistan from the qualifiers. There is no letter from UWW saying Pakistanis may not compete. The door is wide open. But a door that opens onto a corridor you cannot afford to enter is the same as a locked door. The difference is only this: an open door gives you hope, and hope without money hurts more than despair.

The calendar is worse still. The qualifiers begin in February 2027. For the three named wrestlers — Inayatullah, Abdullah, Mohammad Gulzar — that means a compressed development window. They do not need a short camp. They need years of technical build: level changes, chain wrestling, par-terre, and above all hundreds of sparring bouts against elite opponents. Every month without money is a month lost forever. You cannot compensate for time by training harder. High-level sparring time cannot be compressed like a data file.

The scholarship gap: the wound no one sees

I want to devote a passage to the Olympic Solidarity scholarship, because in my experience following Olympic sport, this is the quietest and most costly form of failure.

Each Olympic cycle, the IOC allocates a scholarship fund for athletes from resource-limited nations. The sum is not enormous, but it is the right money for the right person at the right time: it pays for camps, travel, and the bare minimum an athlete needs to compete. For a Pakistani wrestler with no federation salary, such a scholarship can be the difference between stepping onto the mat and going home.

No Pakistani wrestler received one. And this matters for a subtle reason: it is separate from the state-money problem. Even if the PSB has no money, Olympic Solidarity still could have compensated. That the scholarship did not reach those who need it shows the problem runs deeper — in the federation's administrative capacity, in its ability to navigate Olympic sport's bureaucracy.

My hypothesis: the Pakistan Wrestling Federation does not lack money so much as it lacks the administrative capacity to access money. A federation can ask the state for thirty million rupees while not knowing how to file an international scholarship application. That is a different kind of poverty — poverty of system, not of budget.

The mud paradox: when a livelihood sabotages a career

This is the analytical section I consider the most original and important insight of the whole story — the thing most sports articles would skip because it has no medal, no glory, no catchy headline.

Three Pakistani wrestlers earn their living from mud wrestling.

Let me say it again, because it is too important to skim. Athletes trying to win an Olympic mat berth are earning their bread by wrestling in mud.

This is not a colorful detail. It is a physiological tragedy. Mud wrestling and Olympic mat wrestling demand two fundamentally different neuromuscular configurations. Mud rewards raw power, weight, the ability to drag and pin, and endurance under high friction. Olympic mat wrestling rewards level-change speed, hip agility, continuous movement, and refined ground technique.

Every hour these three wrestlers spend mud wrestling is an hour they train exactly the muscular configuration their Olympic sport does not need — and worse, a configuration that hinders them. Raw power accumulated from mud slows the body. It produces athletes who crush opponents with force rather than deceive them with speed. On the Olympic mat, that power becomes a debt.

The survival economy of mud wrestling is actively sabotaging the competitive development of the very wrestlers it feeds. They must master a different discipline to survive, and that mastery erodes their ability to succeed in the discipline they want to pursue.

I have seen the same pattern across many developing sporting nations. People assume a poor athlete will fight more tenaciously out of survival instinct. The truth is the opposite: poverty forces them to scatter body and mind across other sports, other jobs, other cash-paying bouts. Poverty does not forge champions. It merely filters the lucky.

The irony is that mud wrestling is simultaneously the only functioning revenue stream for these athletes. Any policy that "bans" or "restricts" mud wrestling without replacing that income would backfire. You cannot tell a man to stop earning a living in order to focus on a dream with no salary.

The Kyrgyzstan gamble: a decentralized response to a central failure

Amid the bleak picture, there is one small light, and I want to give it the fairness it deserves.

The Pakistan Wrestling Federation is negotiating with Kyrgyzstan to send its wrestlers there for training. Strategically, this is a surprisingly smart move. Kyrgyzstan is a genuine wrestling power — a Central Asian nation with an elite wrestling tradition and Olympic medalists. Turning to Kyrgyzstan shows that at least someone in the federation understands they need high-quality sparring partners who will force Pakistani wrestlers to raise their level.

But here is the problem: the Kyrgyzstan training arrangement depends on covering airfare and accommodation. And there is no money to cover it. A six-month overseas camp ahead of the Nagoya Asian Games was also cancelled for financial reasons.

Let me state this clearly in technical terms, because it is the heart of the development problem. In wrestling, the quality of those you train with determines the quality of who you become. A wrestler who trains only with people in his home gym will never encounter the kinds of opponents that force him to innovate. He will repeat what he already knows. This is why international camps are not rewards — they are essential conditions for technical development.

The Pakistan federation understands this. They are trying to do the right thing. They simply lack the money. And correct understanding without money still leads to failure, just as ignorance without money does.

The Pakistan Wrestling Federation's turn to Kyrgyzstan reflects a decentralized, bilateral workaround to a central funding failure — a pattern common among under-resourced national federations.

The disappearance of the Commonwealth: when the middle rung is removed

Finally in the core section, I want to address the event I consider more destructive in the long term than the funding cut itself: wrestling's removal from the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games program.

Understand the development structure of an Olympic athlete. It has three rungs. The lower rung is the domestic arena — where you learn to win. The middle rung is the mid-tier international arena — where you learn to lose to those better than you and then learn to win again. The upper rung is the Olympic arena — where everything is decided.

The Commonwealth Games are precisely that middle rung. For Pakistan, with its tradition of Commonwealth wrestling medals, this is the most feasible international stage — a place where a wrestler can go out, compete, and bring back a demonstrable result. It is where you prove to sponsors that you are worth investing in.

Wrestling's removal from Glasgow 2026 is not just bad news. It is the removal of the middle rung of a ladder people are trying to climb to the top. Now a Pakistani wrestler must jump straight from the domestic arena to the Olympic qualifiers — a leap no one can make successfully without intermediate preparation.

And the state funding fell to zero. So in the same period, Pakistani wrestling lost both its money source and its stage. This is not a random sequence of events. It is a systemic decline, where each loss makes the next one more severe.

Contrarian angle: I may be wrong — but in which direction?

Now comes my favorite part of any article I write: where I ask myself where I might be wrong. Because an analysis without self-doubt is just a manifesto disguised as data.

My biggest hypothesis is that Pakistan's wrestling problem is a governance and priority problem, not an absolute money problem. But there is another reading I must acknowledge.

That reading says: the entire "lack of money" story is a narrative frame of the federation itself — an advocacy strategy to pressure the PSB. The thirty-million-rupee figure may be a negotiating anchor, not a fully costed budget. If so, the real problem is not the state refusing to pay — but the federation never having presented a financial plan convincing enough to be funded. In that case, responsibility lies at the federation tier, not the government tier.

I think this reading has weight. In many developing nations, sports federations habitually produce enormous figures without detailed spending plans, then blame the state when they are not met. If that is Pakistan's case, the PSB's refusal is not necessarily sabotage — it may be prudence.

But here is why I still lean toward my original hypothesis. Even if the thirty-million figure is an anchor, the actual required figure must still lie somewhere in the range of a few million rupees. And the PSB went from three million to zero. Going from a small sum to zero is not financial prudence. It is abandonment. A prudent government would hold steady or negotiate, not cut to zero.

I must also concede the biggest weakness in the source article's own argument: there is no athlete-level data whatsoever. The three named wrestlers — Inayatullah, Abdullah, Mohammad Gulzar — have no records, no weight classes, no birthdates, no injury histories. When someone says "we have a bunch of wrestlers who can qualify," with no figure attached, that is a statement of faith, not of sport.

This matters because it cuts both ways. If these three wrestlers truly have Olympic potential, then failing to invest in them is a crime. But if they are merely Commonwealth-tier — and no data proves otherwise — then the "wasted talent" story is an exaggeration, and the thirty million rupees may be demanded for an unrealistic goal.

And here is the last thing that makes me hesitate: I have written about sport long enough to know that sometimes the death of a program is not a tragedy, but a release. There are sporting disciplines that should be left to rest rather than artificially resuscitated with taxpayer money for a dream with no foundation. But that is a judgment I lack the data to make. And if I made it without data, I would betray my own brand.

Takeaway: a verifiable prediction, and a question I leave to you

I will not end this article with a reconciliation. I will offer a prediction you can come back to check.

If the Pakistan Wrestling Federation does not resolve the Olympic Solidarity scholarship gap — meaning if it does not apply and secure at least one approved slot within the next six months — then no Pakistani wrestler will qualify for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. Not because they lack talent, but because that gap signals the federation lacks the administrative capacity to turn money into opportunity. And a federation that cannot turn money into opportunity cannot turn opportunity into a ticket.

As for the longer future: the Commonwealth rung has been removed. The qualifiers begin in February 2027. Three wrestlers are still training on a faded mat in a room with no air conditioning, still earning their living from mud. If nothing changes, they will enter the qualifiers as men who have studied the wrong sport their whole lives — not because they chose wrong, but because their system never gave them the chance to study right.

Do not trust the scoreboard; trust the moment where the contest truly belongs. And the true moment of the Pakistan story is not on the LA 2028 mat. It is in an office in Islamabad, where a scholarship application is either filed or forgotten — and no one is filming that moment.

The year 2026 taught me that football is only the echo of humanity in an era of silence. It also taught me that what people hate most is exactly what they most need to see. For Pakistani wrestling, what they need to see is not a medal. It is a number — any number other than zero. Because in sport, zero is not a starting point. It is a finish line written in invisible ink.

And you, if you are a Pakistani sports official reading this: you are holding the pen to sign an application. They can lock the arena doors, but no one can lock the pen. The only question is what you will write — and whether you will write it before February 2027.