Gyanender misses out on bronze medal play-off berth at Worlds

Gyanender today narrowly missed out on a bronze medal play-off berth as Indian Greco-Roman wrestlers finished their campaign without a medal at the World Wrestling Championships here.

Gyanender, who got an opportunity to fight in repechage bouts of Greco-Roman 59kg category, failed to make the most of it as he crashed out of the event after going down in his second repechage round.

Although the 23-year-old Indian won his first repechage bout against Mostafa Hassan Mohamed of Egypt 3-1, he could not overcome the challenge from Ukraine's Dmytro Tsymbaliuk in a closely-fought contest, which ended in 2-2 result.

Earlier, Gyanender defeated China's Libin Ding 4-1 to enter pre-quarterfinals, but faced a 0-9 thrashing at the hands of Kazakhstan's Mirambek Ainagulov.
 

But with the Kazakh wrestler reaching the gold-medal round, Gyanender got another life in the form of a repechage.

Other Indians in the fray today -- Ravinder (66kg), Harpreet Singh (80kg) and Naveen (130kg) -- lost their respective qualification rounds, to bow out of the tournament early.

Ravinder lost 1-2 to Hussam Omaro of Sweden, while Harpreet went down to Askhat Dilmukhamedov of Kazakhstan 1-3 and Naveen faced a 1-2 defeat against Eduard Popp of Germany.