In most of the Games in Olympics, if you lose Quarterfinals you cannot win a Bronze Medal. Bronze Medal match always happens between two loser semifinalists. So if person loses in Quarterfinals, he or she can not win any medal and crashes out of Olympics. So how did Sakshi Malik won Bronze Medal even after losing in Quarter-Finals.
All this happened because of a practice called: REPECHAGE
It is a very fair and simple rule. It gives defeated participants in earlier rounds to Fight for medal again. The only condition is that you are beaten in the knockout stage by the Eventual Finalist of that competition.
So if Finalists are A and B, and you are beaten by either A or B ,then you can have another go at Bronze Medal.
In such cases two separate pools are created consisting losers. In one pool there are all the player who have lost from Player A and in second pool from Player B.
Then Players in each pool play in knockout stage. Loser in round 1 plays with Loser in round 2. Then winner of first match with loser in Round 3 and so on. Winner of all these fights play with Loser in Semifinals. So in the end, instead of one Bronze medal, we have two bronze match winners from each Pool A and B.
Here’s bracket that will help you in easily understanding this rule:-
Sakshi Malik Lost to Valeria Koblova in the quarterfinals of the women’s 58 kg freestyle event by 9-2. When Valeria Kablova reached Finals, it activated REPECHAGE for Sakshi Malik. She won her first REPECHAGE match to qualify for the bronze medal match. In this match she played loser of Semifinals and won match ultimately from 0-5 deficit to 8-5 victory and gave first Medal to India.
So she won two REPECHAGE matches to win Bronze Medal for India. It is interesting to note that Yogeshwar Dutt won three REPECHAGE matches to win Bronze after losing in his very first round in knockout stage in 2012 Olympics.
