Dipa Karmakar Sporting Moment Of The Year

Never in the history of Indian sports had an event been looked forward to with such trepidation.

- Tanmoy Mookherjee

In the few seconds she took to sprint towards the springboard and fling herself onto the vault, somersault two-and-a-half times with arms wrapped around her knees and land on her feet, Dipa Karmakar catapulted herself into Indian Olympic folklore. And, amongst other things, made ‘Produnova’ a household name in India’s collective consciousness.

“I think she can make it to the finals of the vault event in Rio—that is our target. I don’t want to give unnecessary assurances. It’s the Olympics, after all,” Bisweshwar Nandi, Karmakar’s gymnastics coach, had said to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED INDIA roughly a month before the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro were to start. Little would he have known back then that his ward’s fourth-place finish in the vault final at the Arena Olímpico do Rio would see his prophecy come true, and then some.

Karmakar had started executing the Produnova only before the 2014 Commonwealth Games. It’s a move that carries a difficulty rating of 7.000 and Rio gold medallist Simone Biles doesn’t even attempt it because she is “not trying to die.” So tiny are margins in gymnastics disciplines that medals are decided on mere decimal points.