Dipa Karmakar Tokyo Olympics: Gymnast Dipa Karmakar faces new challenges as a series of World Cups, which were part of the Olympic qualification programme, have been recently cancelled. This certainly reduced the chances for the Indian gymnast to qualify in this year’s Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Karmakar, who resumed training with an eye on Olympics qualification, will now have to rework the calendars as two World Cups have been cancelled while a third one, originally scheduled to be held in March, has been postponed by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) due to the pandemic.
Her comeback plans are disturbed as she said she was "prepared" to dive into the Games, starting on July 23. Her long-time coach, Dronacharya awardee Bisheswar Nandi, said that the Rio 2016 Olympian wanted to participate in qualification rounds but "there has been a major shakeup in the Olympic qualification system. There are no international competitions to achieve the qualification points. I don’t know what will be the procedure now,” IANS reported. The world governing body of gymnastics cancelled the Cottbus World Cup, scheduled to start on February 25, and World Cup in Baku, Azerbaijan, scheduled to start from March 4.
According to Nandi, these cancellations and postponement have disturbed Karmakar's Olympics ambitions as it is mandatory to compete in three Olympic qualifiers (World Cups) to achieve the points.
No chances for Dipa Karmakar now?
The 27-year-old finished fourth at the Rio Olympics in 2016, and she was touted as the next big star in Indian sport. She underwent surgery to treat her ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injury in 2017. The nagging knee injury had forced her to withdraw from the Olympic qualifier in Germany in 2019. She had to sit out for the majority of the 2019 season. After a long lay-off of nearly two years due to injury, she created history by becoming the first Indian gymnast to clinch a gold at FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Challenge Cup at Mersin, Turkey, in 2019.
The coach has now accepted that it would be “very difficult” for Karmakar to qualify for Tokyo as to "earn an Olympics berth an athlete should have 90 points, but Dipa has less than half of that" since she could not play most of the tournaments in 2019. "We are now waiting for the world body to officially say something,” he added.
Nandi informed that the Doha World Cup, an Olympic qualifier starting from March 10, has been postponed.
The Tripura girl has been practising gymnastics from the age of six. Born with a flat foot, a barrier for her to go ahead in the sport, the determined sportswoman trained and fought to overcome the challenge.
She won accolades at Rio for performing the ‘vault of death’ — the Produnova. The category is indeed a challenging one in which the landing is risky and uncertain.
Feature Image Credit: NDTV
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