She has already grabbed a piece of history by becoming the first Indian woman gymnast to qualify for the Olympics and Dipa Karmakar would aim to touch greater heights when she competes at the Rio Games, here on Sunday.
Fighting all odds, the 22-year-old diminutive girl from Tripura had qualified for the Olympics at this very venue in April. She has given her soul into mastering the highly difficult Produnova — a double front somersault vault — and is relying on it for a super show.
She says she has done about 1000 repetitions of the move so the key for her would be do well in the uneven bars, beam and floor exercises. Dipa does not like to sit back on her laurels and knows well what her focus should be, an Olympic medal to create a gymnastics revolution back home. After all, she has had several firsts.
Dipa was the first Indian woman gymnast to win a medal at the Commonwealth Games (Glasgow 2014) and followed it up with a Bronze at the Asian Championships in Hiroshima. She also reached the final round of the 2015 World Championships and finished fifth. Daughter of a weightlifting coach, Dipa, who has been practising gymnastics since the age of six, had to train extra hard because she had flat feet.
Focused on the sport since the day she saw Ashish Kumar win a medal in Commonwealth Games New Delhi 2010, Dipa trains about eight hours a day in two sessions at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in Delhi where she has a special equipment.