Dipa, India’s gymnastic hope

Dear Sir,Many in India have their eyes on Rio de Janeiro today to find out whether Dipa Karmakar could win an Olympic medal in the gymnastics finals. She is the first gymnast from India to compete in  Olympics. Dipa’s coach, Bisweshwar Nandi, caught his first glimpse of the Olympic rings after touching down in Rio with his gymnastics protege and he felt an instant surge of adrenaline. His star pupil is definitely shouldering hopes of a billion people. This brings back memories of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics where P T Usha from Kerala, popularly known as “Payyoli Express”, came into the limelight. Unfortunately, she lost the bronze medal by one-hundredth of a second in the finals of 400m hurdles then.Let us hope that Dipa, who had a quiet 23rd birthday on August 9, will fare better and make history for India today. Significantly, she is the third woman in gymnastics history to land successfully in the “Produnova vault”, which is named after Yelena Produnova of Russia who was the first person to display this extremely difficult skill successfully in 1999. The ‘Produnova” is an artistic gymnastics vault consisting of a front handspring onto the vault horse and two front somersaults off. This one is also the hardest vault ever performed in women’s artistic gymnastics. As long as the gymnast lands on her feet first, she will get credit for the vault and because of the massive difficulty in achieving this, it is possible to get high score even with a poor execution. It is worth mentioning here that there have been calls to ban the Produnova vault because of the high level of risk it involves.Dipa hails from a lower middle-class  family based in the tiny north Indian state of Tripura. With  no money available at all, her coach Nandi used his own skills to build some apparatus for her when she first started out as a gymnast. 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. Dipa has managed to win a bronze medal in the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games followed by becoming the first Indian to reach an apparatus final at World Championships in 2015. After missing out on automatic Olympic qualification by just 0.4 of a point in last year’s World Championships, she made India take notice when she showed off her full repertoire in acrobatic skills in the Rio test event to become the first Indian female gymnast to qualify for the Games with a coveted first place.However, since over-expectation and over-pressure on any contestant in any sport produce adverse results, everybody has to realise that this is a sport where a toe-length hop forward on landing or a slight bent knee can scupper medal hopes. According to coach Nandi, margins between success and failure can be just paper thin and because of this he is  under tremendous pressure aggravated by high expectations back at home. Irrespective of Dipa winning an Olympic medal or not, I am sure that she has inspired and motivated thousands of young girls in the second-most populous country in the world. By excelling in a sport, quite novel to India,  she has set a trend in her country.  Like the “Usha School of Athletics” in Kozhikode, Kerala, founded by Olympian P T Usha in 2002 with a branch in Gujarat, we can expect to see the formation of a “Dipa Karmakar School of Gymnastics for Women” in future, training a number of talented Indian gymnasts.Elias JacobP O Box 5994Doha