To me, Confidence comes through wrestling: Helen Maroulis

Mmbai : If you thought Dangal was inspiring stuff for budding female sportspersons across the world, you must listen to Helen Maroulis, who became the first-ever American to win a gold medal in women's freestyle wrestling at the Rio Olympics last year.

Greeting you with an infectious smile adorning her pretty face, the champion grappler who is on her maiden visit to India and apparently struggling to control the urge to gorge on some butter chicken, tells you how she was drawn to wrestling because she wasn't proving to be good enough at any other sport.

"I started wrestling when I was seven. Every other sport that I played I was asked to quit. So, gymnastic, ballet, diving...you know your 'girl sports...' instructors would ask my mom to not bring me back," Maroulis tells TOI on the sidelines of a promotional event for PWL-3 which gets underway in January. "I would just cry and shut down, and I didn't like being watched. So, people think that you only do women's wrestling if you're tough. Like only 'tough women' do it. But I say: 'No.' Because I had no toughness. In fact, I was shy and scared. Wrestling made me confident in myself. And that helps in all areas of life as a woman. You want to have confidence in your marriage, studies, relationships, business, and whatever you want to do. A sport like wrestling helps you teach that."

Besides her Olympic heroics, the 26-year-old grappler had also won a gold medal at the World Wrestling Championships in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, but there were challenges to overcome at the start of her career.

"After my first year of wrestling, my parents came to me and said: 'You've to quit wrestling.' This was back in 1999. They said: 'It's not an Olympic sport. There's no future. We don't want our daughter to grow up wrestling boys. You're in high school and that's weird. No way!'" recalls the Rockville-born-wrestler.

"And then two months later, they announced that women's wrestling was going to be in the Olympics. And so my parents came back to me and they said: 'If you want to do this, there's a future now. So, I was like: 'This is what I want to do.'"

As a budding grappler, Maroulis had to negotiate the challenges that tend to confront many girls who chose her sport. "Growing up, I had to wrestle with boys. And sometimes the boys were mean. Sometimes, the coaches and parents didn't like me. People said things, or they tried to hurt me or they tried to make me quit, or they wouldn't coach me," she says.