Dipa Karmakar performing her floor exercise
When Dipa Karmakar slumped into a chair at the Rio Olympic Arena on Sunday after her ‘vault of death’ did not go to plan, the glazed look in her eyes suggested her 2016 Games were over. Seven hours later the smile was back on her face as the 22-year-old realised she had clinched the eighth and last qualifying place for the vault final and could become the first Indian to win an Olympic gymnastics medal.
Karmakar had one of the highest difficulty (7.000) among the women for her risky Produnova vault - a front handspring into double front somersault - but failed to pull it off cleanly as her bottom touched the mat before she bounced back on to her feet.
A score of 15.100 was much lower than she had hoped for and when she stumbled sideways following her second vault to earn 14.600, she knew her average score of 14.850 that left her sixth in the standings at the time could be overtaken since more than half the field had yet to compete on her signature apparatus.
‘As the Produnova vault was the first thing I attempted today and it did not go as expected, it immediately put me in a bad mood,’ Karmakar, the first Indian female gymnast to qualify for the Olympics, said Karmakar in her native Bengali.
Read more: https://goo.gl/CNgFC3
No comments:
Post a Comment