“When they took me for a dope test, Chhote (Lal, Mary’s coach) was telling me, ‘We have lost 3-2 but to me, you are a winner, don’t worry’,” Mary said, almost three hours after her bout against Colombia’s Ingrit Valencia. “I asked him, ‘what do you mean by that? I have won, no?’ It was at that point I realised I had lost. Then, I got notification of a tweet by (union minister) Kiren Rijiju sir, and I thought, ‘oh my God, what happened?’”
What seems to have happened is a series of misunderstandings in what eventually turned out to be Mary’s last Olympic bout.