Unfortunate Inam finishes with a bronze in the Beach Wrestling World Series

By our correspondent

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s premier wrestler Mohammad Inam on Sunday finished his Beach Wrestling World Series first stop journey with a bronze medal in Turkey.

Inam, playing in the 90 kilogramme weight category, fell to Azerbaijan’s Ibrahim Yusubov 2-3 in the semi-finals. It was a tough fight with both grapplers making top efforts to prevail over each other. However, it was Ibrahim who prevailed in the end. Inam had beaten Ibrahim twice in the past events. Inam then beat Mahmut Syyfi Ozkaya of Turkey 2-1 in the bronze medal fight.

Inam has a huge stature in beach wrestling in the world, having clinched two World Championship titles, one World Beach Games crown and last year won two world series titles. Earlier, Inam started the day with a victory over Haci Abdullah Dilek of Turkey in the quarter-finals. “This time they changed the rules and two grapplers of some countries also featured which made the event tougher,” Inam told this correspondent.

“Turkey, Georgia and some other nations fielded two wrestlers each and I played against three Turkish players who were very tough. As you know I had focussed mainly on the Commonwealth Games and was training in mat wrestling. For beach wrestling world series I had trained for only 15 days. You know if you are to fight for a title in world beach wrestling event you need to train at least for two months,” Inam said. However, he was quick to add that in future the performance will be much better.

On the first day, on Saturday, Inam had defeated Turkey’s Mahmut Seyfi Ozkaya 2-1 in his first fight of Group B before overcoming Dato Piruzashvili of Grorgia 4-0 in his second fight. Inam will return on Tuesday (morrow) to join the camp of the national team preparing for the Commonwealth Games and Islamic Games. The Commonwealth Games will be held in Birmingham from July 28 to August 8. The Islamic Games will be hosted by Turkey in Konya from August 9-18. This was the first stop of the beach world series. The event also serves as qualifiers for the World Beach Games to be held next year.