Know Your Asian Games Girls — Gymnast Dipa Karmakar

You know her as the first Indian woman Gymnast at Olympics 2016, but since then Dipa Karmakar  has come a long way. The 24-year-old put the spotlight on a sport discipline that we had never thought we even participated in. The ongoing Jakarta Asian Games will see her representing the country once again. Dipa has been away from the thick of things since she underwent a surgery last year for an Anterior Cruciate Ligament tear of her right knee.

Here why you should be cheering up for India’s top notch gymnast:

This daughter of a weightlifting coach has been practising  gymnastics from the age of six. Born with flat feet, a barrier for her to go ahead in the sport,the determined sportswoman trained and fought to overcome the challenge. At 14,  Dipa won the Junior Nationals held in Jalpaiguri.

The year 2015 appeared as a win-win for the Tripura girl. She picked up five gold medals at the National Games in Kerala – in individual all-round, table vault, balancing beam, uneven parallel bars and floor exercises. She also reached the final round of the 2015 World Championships and finished fifth. In the same year, she notched up a bronze medal at the Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Japan.

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Career Highlights

• Dipa has brought 78 medals including 68 golds back home. Ten days after her surgery, she received the Padma Shri from then President Pranab Mukherjee.
• She clinched a bronze in the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, to become the first Indian woman gymnast to win a medal.
• Dipa showed strong performance at the Final Qualifier and Olympic Test Event in Rio de Janeiro, when she garnered 15.0666 points in her first vault, the Produnova in April 2016.
• The Arjuna Awardee Dipa is only the fifth gymnast in history who successfully landed/majored the ‘vault of death’ — the Produnova. The category is indeed a challenging game in which the landing is risky and uncertain.

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Still Going Strong

Dipa skipped the World Gymnastics Championships last year as she was recovering from the knee surgery in April 2017.

Due to her surgery, Dipa had to go through a rehabilitation for over nine months. She couldn’t even practice and missed a lot of competitions, which included the Commonwealth Games, Asian Championships and World Championships.

Dipa Karmakar has been trained by Bisbeshwar Nandi. She clinched the gold medal in the vault event of FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Challenge Cup at Mersin, Turkey on July 8. She will also be competing in the FIG World Challenge Cup in Mersin, Turkey. While physical strength is definitely a must have for Dipa right now, her coach thinks that mental strength can make her win 80% of the battle.

SheThePeople.TV wishes all athletes best of luck at the upcoming Asian Games.

More Power to You!

Feature Image Credit: India.com

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