Former Indian gymnast Dipa Karmakar believes most of the current generation of gymnasts lack passion and urged them to embrace the sport enthusiastically to excel on the global stage.
Dipa, who blazed a trail by becoming the first Indian woman gymnast to compete at the Olympics and finish a historic fourth in the 2016 Rio Games, retired earlier this month, ending a career in which she inspired awe for routinely performing the highly-difficult Produnova vault.
“There was junoon (passion) in Dipa, that is why. Same for Pranati,” she said when asked why there is only one Dipa or Pranati Nayak among Indian women gymnasts winning medals on the international stage.
“I can’t see this junoon (passion) much in the current generation (of gymnasts). I feel they look for short-term, instant success,” she said on Friday night during a panel discussion at an event titled ‘Beyond the Finish Line’, organised by Vedanta Delhi Half Marathon.
READ | Dipa Karmakar, India’s first Olympic gymnast, bids adieu
The 31-year-old from Tripura grabbed headlines with her fourth-place finish in the vault final of the 2016 Rio Games, losing an Olympic medal by just 0.15 points.
Tokyo Olympian Pranati has won a vault bronze medal each in the 2019 and 2022 Asian Championships. Hailing from Agartala, Dipa is one of only five women in gymnastics history to have successfully executed the Produnova, which involves two somersaults before landing and is called the ‘vault of death’ owing to the high risk of injury it poses.
She felt that the problems plaguing the national federation for some time have also not helped the cause of Indian gymnastics.
“There was a problem between the SAI and the federation. For example, the selection criteria for the last Asian Games (2023) were known only after the actual trials.
“I want to bring changes in Indian gymnastics so that these kinds of problems do not happen in future, but I can’t do this alone,” she said when asked about her future plans.
While announcing her retirement, Dipa had said that she would give back to the sport by becoming a coach at some point in her life or she might simply remain a “supporter of the next generation of gymnasts following their dreams”.
As recently as May, Dipa won a vault gold medal at the Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Tashkent but decided to retire a few months later.
Asked why she decided to retire, she said, “I had two ACL surgeries, shoulder and ankle injury. I was not being able to do my main event of vault the way I wanted. If the body is not allowed to push, there is no point in continuing.” When she started the sport in her home state, people would tell her why a woman should do gymnastics.
“People asked negative questions like ‘Do women play gymnastics’? Another thing is many people do not know where Tripura is located. They would ask whether it is in Bangladesh or Northeast India.
“I want to put Tripura on the Indian sporting map and also to show that women can excel in the sport of gymnastics.”
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