Ritu Phogat has flown back to India to celebrate Independence Day with her parents. The ONE Championship atomweight shared a series of Instagram posts to commemorate the occasion.
It is a national holiday in India today because the country gained its independence from Great Britain exactly 75 years ago. Throughout the country people are hoisting the national flag aloft and Phogat and her family got in on the celebrations:
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Famous family
Phogat is based in Singapore where she trains and teaches at Evolve MMA. But she flew back to India especially for this occasion and has shared a series of patriotic posts with her 426,000 followers.
Phogat has represented her country as a wrestler, winning gold at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Singapore. But she is best known because of the movie Dangal which was based on the life story of her and her sisters.
The man in the middle of the photo is her father, Mahavir Singh Phogat. He wrestled at an amateur level and decided that he was going to teach his four daughters to wrestle.
They would all go on to enjoy success and the story was immortalized by the Bollywood movie Dangal which grossed $311–330 million USD worldwide, an Indian box office record at the time.
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New career
Phogat is the youngest of the four sisters who all went on to become wrestling stars, as well as two of their cousins. They are all household names in India but she is the only one who has transitioned to MMA.
She made her ONE Championship debut in 2019 and has fought nine times for the promotion, winning seven of those bouts. Last year she reached the final of the atomweight Grand Prix.
Phogat came up short on that occasion, she was submitted by Stamp Fairtex and missed out on the chance to challenge former Evolve MMA teammate Angela Lee for the atomweight title. But she remains one of the top atomweights on the roster and retains a big fan following in India.
