For Gold & Glory
A contingent of 121 Indian athletes sets off for Rio in a few days’ time. India Today profiles the gold hopefuls
it’s 8 am and the morning sessions are on at the gymnastics arena of the Indira Gandhi stadium complex in Delhi. The athletes are going through the grind but all eyes are on a 22-year-old girl. The three coaches present seem to be fixated by the somersaults performed by the short, slender figure. Dipa Karmakar is the lone Indian gymnast to qualify for Rio. She’s also the country’s first woman gymnast ever to qualify for the world’s biggest sports extravaganza. But it’s not the only thing that makes her special.
Karmakar is also drawing attention because she genuinely has an outside chance of getting on the podium, and because her mastery of the extremely difficult and dangerous Produnova vault has turned heads wherever she has gone. Named after the Russian gymnast legend Elena Produnova, the move—a powerful handspring that propels the gymnast into two-and-a-half front somersault and then a frontal landing—so impressed judges and viewers at the World Championships last November, that even the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique, the parent body of gymnastics, awarded a commendation certifying her as a ‘world class gymnast’. Karmakar, incidentally, has the highest score in the Produnova vault in the world: 15.300, which is 7.000 for difficulty, and an 8.300 for execution. The vault is so rare and so risky that very few gymnasts attempt it, and only five have ever been able to execute it successfully.
“I know the Produnova vault is dangerous. But I have been doing it for the last two years. You have to take a little risk to achieve something,” Dipa says. “I have been training for the Olympics since 2014. At Rio, my aim will be to reach the finals first, and then take it as it comes.”
It is the vault that Karmakar is best at, and it’s the one apparatus on which she will genuinely fancy her chances in Rio. The sprint to the board, the clean takeoff, the aerial somersaults, the gentle touch of the cushion, and the firm landing are what have set her apart right through her gymnastics journey. She won a bronze on the vault at the Commonwealth Games in 2014—the first-ever gymnastics medal by an Indian woman at the event—and got a fourth-place finish at the Incheon Asian Games later that year. These were followed by a bronze at the Asian Championships in 2015 and a fifth-place finish at the World Championships, where no Indian woman had ever participated before.
With just weeks to go, Karmakar knows she’s on the home stretch now. There’s no time for interviews, not even for a photo shoot. Every moment is spent in the final stage of her preparations for Rio. Gruelling 8-hour training sessions means she has time for little else. Manjushree Roy, the Sports Authority of India administrator at the complex, says, “I ensure that she doesn’t need to worry about anything—from her diet to masseur to psychological counseling.”
Born in Agartala in 1993, she was introduced to the sport at the early age of six by her father Dulal Karmakar, a weightlifting coach. She’s been with her current coach, Bisheshwar Nandi, since 2001. “It was never easy to dream of an Olympic medal with Dipa who, when she first came to me, had flat feet...a big handicap for a prospective gymnast as it affects the spring. But I knew she was special and with constant exercises over time, we got her foot to curl,” says Nandi.
Within hours of qualifying for the Olympics, Karmakar clinched the gold in vaults finals at the Olympics test event. This was the first time an Indian woman had clinched a gold in a global gymnastic competition. A billion Indians will be hoping she repeats this feat next month at Rio.
“You have to take a little risk to achieve something”