Dipa’s effort lands her on doorstep of history
LANDMARK MOMENT Tripura gymnast executes the difficult Produnova to make it to the vault final; coach Nandi confident of her doing nation proud in medal round
When Bisweswar Nandi caught his first glimpse of the Olympic rings after touching down in Rio with his gymnastics protege Dipa Karmakar, he felt an instant surge of adrenaline.
Within seconds though, that excitement was replaced with shivers down his spine as he realised that his star pupil is shouldering the hopes of a billion people.
“I am under so much pressure. Everyone in India is expecting Dipa to create history in Rio,” Nandi told Reuters in an interview after he watched Karmakar soar into the air as she practiced her trademark vault in the Rio Olympic Arena.
“I feel that we are carrying the dreams of a billion Indians who just cannot understand how difficult it is for Dipa to get a medal here,” he said. “Because Dipa won the vault gold in the Rio test event in April, the entire country thinks she will come back home with a medal.”
That test event proved to be the making of Karmakar.
After missing out on automatic Olympic qualification by just 0.4 of a point at last year’s Glasgow world championships, she made India take notice when she showed off her full repertoire of acrobatic skills in the test event to become the first Indian female gymnast to qualify for the Games. But in a sport where a toelength hop forward on landing or a slight bent knee can scupper medal hopes, Nandi knows the margins between success and failure can be paper thin.
“What people in India don’t understand is that the four girls who finished ahead of her at last year’s world championships were not at the test event because they had already qualified for the Olympics,” added the coach whose own gymnastic dreams stalled with appearances in the Asian and Commonwealth Games in the 1970s.
“This is really giving me sleepless nights because medals can disappear by 0.001 of a point. There is just so much hope and expectation in India, I just don’t know how to deal with all this heavy burden.”
Nandi is no stranger to overcoming impossible obstacles in a country where cricketers are gods and gymnasts are, well, nobodies. With no apparatus or money available, Nandi utilised his own DIY skills to build some apparatus for Karmakar when she first started out. That involved constructing a springboard from second-hand parts of a discarded scooter and stacking several crash mats on top of each other to make a vault. Add in the abuse he got in India’s conservative society for dedicating so many hours each day to fulfil the dreams of a young girl, and life was not easy.