New Delhi: Tripura girl Dipa Karmakar created history on Monday by becoming the first ever female gymnast from India to qualify for the Olympics. The 22-year-old scored 52.698 points in artistic gymnastics at the Olympic test event held in Rio de Janeiro to secure her berth for the Olympic Games in August.
Besides being the first woman, she is also the first Indian gymnast to qualify for the quadrennial event after a gap of 52 years. Since Independence, 11 Indian male gymnast have taken part in the Olympics (two in 1952, three in 1956 and six in 1964) but this will be the first for an Indian woman at the Olympics.
The International Federation of Gymnastics (Federation Internationale de Gymnastique) confirmed Dipa’s Rio Games qualification in an official statement.
Dipa has been listed as the 79th among individual qualifiers in the list of the women’s artistic gymnasts who have qualified for the Rio Olympics.
Her first vault, the difficult Produnova, gave Dipa 15.066 points, the highest among the 14 competitors. But a poor show in the uneven bars took her points down as she collected 11.700, the second worst among the 14 participants.
The Tripura girl secured 13.366 and 12.566 points in beam and floor exercises.
The 2015 Arjuna Awardee narrowly missed out on an Olympic berth at the World Championships in Novemeber, where she placed fifth in vault at the finals — a feat which led to her being named as one of the entrants to the current test event in Rio.
She was earlier put as second reserve for the ongoing Olympic Test event but was informed last month that she had made it into the shortlist of participants.
Dipa had created history by becoming the first woman gymnast to win a medal — a bronze — in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014. She then became the first Indian woman to feature in the finals of World Championships in November last.
Dipa was introduced to gymnastics by her father, who was a weightlifting coach with the Sports Authority of India. Her qualification also marks the validation of the hard work put in by her long-time coach, Bishweshwar Nandi, whom she has trained with for over 16 years now.
Nandi has been instrumental in correcting Dipa’s flat foot, which can be a major hindrance to any gymnast. He also constantly oversaw her training, as she worked to successfully land one of the most dangerous vaults in world sport — the Produnova. Karmakar is one of only five women in the world to successfully perform the vault — a front handspring into a double front somersault.
