Some elite athletes have a different race to run before their competition: the race to shed precious kilos. But since they anyway have low body-fat percentages, losing weight is harder for elite athletes than for regular folks. This means desperate measures – ones that should come with “do not try this at home” warnings – are employed to cut weight quickly.
The Indian Express spoke to one of the country’s top jockeys, two weightlifters and two rowers to understand the madness behind the method.
‘I run with four-five layers of clothes on for 45 mins on treadmill… no lunches on racedays, rarely have dinner on training days’
On some days, before Suraj Narredu gets on the horse to ride it for a lung-bursting effort to win a derby, the country’s top jockey has a different battle to fight, all by himself: the fight to shed a few quick kilograms.
As he points out, jockeys are weighed with as much diligence as you would employ for measuring gold. Every gram matters.
That would explain why there are days when Narredu puts on as many as four layers of clothes, then tops it up with a plastic jacket, and then pounds his feet on the treadmill for 45 minutes to an hour. And then, for good measure, he immerses himself in a bathtub with piping hot water to sweat off a few more grams.
“In the first 10 years of my racing career, I was lighter. So I didn’t have to do so much to lose weight on race days. But over the past 10 years, as you age, losing weight tends to get harder. I do the treadmill routine very often,” Narredu, 38, tells The Indian Express on a day he has put himself through the grind on the treadmill.
Suraj Narredu is one of the country’s top horseracing jockeys. (PHOTOS: Suraj Narredu Instagram)
That morning he woke up weighing 56 kilos. And the catch for Narredu was he had to ride a horse at a 54-and-a-half kg handicap. A handicap is the combined weight of the rider and the riding paraphernalia that a horse is allowed to carry during a race like the saddle. The better the horse, the higher the handicap.
“So I had to drop one and a half kilos and ride three races,” he says. “I wore the plastic suit over four or five layers of clothing. Then I ran on the treadmill for about 45 minutes. I lost one and a half kilos there itself. But just to be sure, I then went and sat in the bathtub filled with hot water for 20 or 25 minutes. I lost about another half a kilo there. That half a kilo gives you a cushion to have small sips of electrolytes or some juice before the race.”
A lot of Narredu’s battle against his weight is fought over the week with a blinkered approach to food. Jockeys are known to have the tiniest appetites in the world. There are races from Thursdays to Sundays. So on Mondays, jockeys allow themselves the luxury of having a proper lunch.
“Mondays are a full-on blast: Monday lunches are the best ones traditionally for all jockeys. It’s the only day that you’re not thinking which horses you’re running at what weight because there are a few days for that,” says Narredu.
On Mondays, Narredu likes to go to Andhra-style restaurants to grab what he calls his “cheat meal of the week”. But even then, the portions he eats are frugal.
“The cravings are done with at the start of the week. Suppose I go to a biryani place with my family, I’ll have maybe two bites of biryani or maybe some chicken. If we go to a sushi place, and we order sushi or dimsums, I’ll probably have one of each. I cannot even finish half a biryani properly. The stomach has shrunk that much over the years. I’m a foodie. I love to try different cuisines. But what I do is that I eat a bite of everything,” he says.
Narredu continues: “On Mondays, dinner becomes small because there is no place left after a heavy lunch. If I’m eating at home, then the meal is maybe soup or one roti or boiled vegetables. Tuesday lunches are a little lighter and usually home-cooked. Wednesdays are even lighter than the previous day. If I’ve had a heavy gym or cardio session on Thursday, then I feed electrolytes inside my body and boiled eggs, fish or meat for protein.”
Wednesdays are days when he drinks plenty of tender coconut water or freshly squeezed juices throughout the day. The process of dropping weight starts in earnest from Thursday, when he cuts down on food intake and eats light: just fruits, vegetables or liquids.
“From Thursdays onwards till Sunday, which are usually race days, you can’t eat anything. So you’re starving from the morning. It’s only dinner, dinner, dinner for those days. There’s no lunch for sure on race days. A lot of jockeys do have breakfast on race days, but I never have it,” says Narredu, whose day starts at 5 am with a glass of warm water.
For Narredu, a ‘good, nice lunch’ is heavy on protein. He adds that he always eats light dinners because, after about 20 years as a jockey, his stomach capacity has shrunk.
If all of that sounds a little crazy, Narredu says that riders before his era would resort to even more insane things to knock off weight quickly.
“I’ve heard some crazy things before my time when people were not too focussed on diets or the exercise part of it. Jockeys used to just ride horses and then used to eat and drink. I used to hear that a lot of jockeys used to have this pill (a diuretic). It basically drains out all the liquid in your body. You keep going and pissing all the time. But it apparently takes a lot out of the person,” he says, claiming the current riders don’t use such pills.
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‘I eat one or two rotis in an entire week… my daily diet is sprouts, veggies and dry fruits’
At the Army Rowing Node in Pune, the sight of Dhananjay Pande in the army mess causes a few eyebrows to go up.
Pande, who was part of the men’s eight team that won a silver medal at the recent Hangzhou Asian Games, is not a regular at the mess, unlike the rest of the eight members of his rowing team.
In the men’s eight crew, Pande was the ninth member of the team: the coxswain. The coxswain is the only member in the unit who does not have an oar in his hand and sits facing the finish line.
Dhananjay Pande (extreme right) was part of the men’s eight team that won a silver medal at the recent Hangzhou Asian Games. In the men’s eight crew, Pande was the ninth member of the team: the coxswain, who is usually the tiniest and lightest member. (Screengrab)
In a discipline where synchronicity is king, it is the tiniest member in the boat who has to keep the eight members in a uniform line. As the Indian team stood at the podium at Hangzhou earlier this year to claim their silver medal, while the rest of the eight looked remarkably alike in body structure, Pande stood out: while the other eight were 6’2″ or 6’3″ tall and weighed around 80 kilos, Pande is 5’7″ and weighs 55kg.
While the rest of the team spends their days training their oar work at the Army Rowing Node, Pande spends the year keeping his weight in check. In races, Pande has to weigh 55 kilograms – the minimum requirement. Any lower and race organisers add dead weights to the boat to compensate. And if he goes higher, it is a disadvantage for his team.
This requires the 32-year-old Pande to live his life on a spartan diet of sprouts and dry fruits. He claims the last time he ate a laddoo or a pastry “must have been before 2012”.
“I even avoid things like rice and chapatis. I’ll average about one or two rotis in an entire week, but not more. I always have to keep an eye on my weight. The one thing I do is keep my liquid intake high. Even if there are no competitions, I like to keep my weight maintained. The only time I eat proper meals is when I am home in my village for my yearly leave. But since I’m indulging, I’ll also work out during these vacations,” says the Indian Army Subedar.
Neetish Kumar, who was a part of the men’s 8 team in Hangzhou, says his teammate ‘barely eats anything at all!’ “So seeing him in the army mess is a surprise. We usually see him going through running sessions twice or sometimes three times a day. There have been entire weeks I have seen him not eat a whole lot ahead of competitions,” he says.
While the rest of his crew may not be on a strict diet like Pande, other rowers who compete in lightweight sculls events also have to watch their weight carefully. While the men’s eight is an open weight event, rowers in lightweight events cannot be over 70 kilos.
“Because we’re lightweight rowers, we consume very less carbs. Our food is very protein heavy instead. Our meals are mostly green veggies and salads,” says Arvind Singh, one half of India’s silver medal-winning lightweight men’s double sculls team at Hangzhou 2023.
A subedar in the army, Arvind is 6’1” tall and needs to keep his body weight at 70 kg when he competes. “I eat one roti per day; either for lunch or dinner.”
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‘Sometimes I give up eating for two days before competitions’
Earlier this month, with just a couple of days to go before she competed at a zonal weightlifting event in Kolkata, Jhilli Dalabehera realised she was just about two kilos over the weight limit.
Jhilli’s natural body weight is around 51 kilograms on most days, but she competes in the 49kg weight class rather than her other option: to compete against ‘stronger’ lifters in the 55kg event. While 55kg is a category at the World Weightlifting Championships, at Paris Olympics next year, someone like a Jhilli would have to compete in either the 49kg or the 59kg category with no weight classes in the middle.
“When this happens, I give up eating for two days. And then, after the weigh-in I will drink plenty of water and eat something like boiled eggs. If I can get boiled potato and rice then even better,” she tells The Indian Express.
Dropping weight is a tactic many weightlifters and wrestlers employ to gain an advantage over the rest of the field. But what this means is drastic measures in the days leading up to the competition like completely swearing off food and even water before doing aerobic exercises under the sun to drain out body fluids or going for sauna sessions.
Indian weightlifter Jhilli Dalabehera competes in the women’s 49kg category. (PHOTOS: Jhilli Dalabehera/Facebook)
What this does though is leave the athlete alarmingly dehydrated on competition days.
“There is a one-hour weigh-in window on days you compete. And it shuts one hour before your event. So athletes try to give their weight as early as possible in the weigh-in window so they have some time to lose weight if needed. Then, in the one hour between the weight-in and competition, they drink juices and electrolytes to rehydrate themselves besides eating something sweet for instant energy,” explains Harshada Garud, who earlier this year became the first junior world weightlifting champion from India.
While Garud says she’s never had to drop weight using dramatic measures, she’s seen plenty of people needing to do it.
“If you’re able to maintain your weight through diet alone, then you don’t need to resort to all of this. In my case, I don’t have to go through these insane routines to break weight before competitions. But I have seen other weightlifters do it,” she says.