Vaulting ambition, soaring dreams

All of this made Bisweshwar Nandi feel fearfully small.

And to think that the same BS Nandi is now dreaming of taking on the entire might of the gymnastics world — USA, China and Russia — by training his student Dipa Karmakar in some of gymnastics’ most sophisticated skills-set, urging her to aim for the Olympics — nothing less, and making it look imminently possible. It is an unlikely story of a young boy who was so mesmerised by gymnastics and with a voracious appetite for knowledge, that he could take leaps of limb and faith, and pass it onto his ward who has enjoyed a breakthrough season this year: A bronze medal at Commonwealth Games; 4th at Asian Games and recently 10th at the World Championships — by far the highest placing ever for any Indian gymnast, men or women, at the Worlds.

It was this one man’s inspired decision to start Karmakar out on the 7.0 Difficulty-level (D-Level) world class Produnova vault which fetched her the CWG medal, and his stubborn persistence in pushing the 21-year-old to pursue this complicated routine that is getting Indian gymnastics a seriously curious glance from the rest of the world. If you thought the coach and the girl are fixated on just that one vault, Nandi has lined up immaculate plans to take Karmakar to the Olympics by adding other variations to her arsenal.

The small boy, confined to his house feeling all walled in over 40 years ago, is breaking free and reaching for the distant stars, not guffawing incredulously at the hint of a possibility of an Olympic medal.

It started when he allowed the name Aleksandr Nikolaevich Dityatin to roll easy off his tongue. The Russian gymnast once held the all-time Olympic record for most individual medals at a single Games, until Michael Phelps fetched up.

Idol worship

“Tripura had a good tradition on the pommel horse and I liked it because it was the only apparatus that didn’t need power. But then I saw a sports magazine at my coach’s house, where Dityatin was performing magic on the pommel horse. It jumped at me from the still pictures and I wanted to learn more,” Nandi remembers.

Agartala was still a sleepy town where parents insisted children stick to studies, but Dityatin became Nandi’s distraction. “I’d wait for magazines that came weeks later from Bombay and Delhi and I learnt new things reading. I really wanted to talk to him, and on one tour to Russia I was carrying a Shivling just in case I met him. We did meet, and I presented it to him telling him it was an Indian god. It was funny — both of us spoke broken English. But we communicated well enough and he generously told me about technique,” the 4-time national champ who also made the finals at the Bangkok Asiad (in pommel horse), recalls. Dityatin wasn’t the only champ who was sought out with a flurry of questions.

India’s pre-historic infrastructure or lack of critical mass never deterred Nandi. In fact, in a decade when Tripura’s boys did reasonably well at the nationals, and the girls teams were non-existent, the coach was called to prop up their performance. He had to cut short his own career after his parents told him he needed to find a job, the family facing a severe financial crunch. “I returned halfway from a camp at Patiala and joined the state service, and became a coach,” his own ambitions brought down to earth by the realities of making a livelihood.

Nandi spent several days dismaying over his charges dropping out. “In Tripura, we would lose girl gymnasts after juniors as parents wanted them to stop. I would go to their homes and talk to families, plead with them. But eventually they’d leave. Dipa stuck on because her father — a weightlifting coach — was understanding. She was very good on the vaulting table, and her father supported every decision from letting her continue to approving the high-risk routines that she started on this year. All parents are not the same,” Nandi says. The coach demanded absolute trust — for risky manoeuvres can’t be half-hearted. “I told her if you listen to me, you’ll win medals. If you are stubborn, then none of it will work.”
At the Antwerp Worlds, Nandi would first spot the double-front handspring — thrown by a South African, and his mind started whirring. “Some people were too technical and kept saying only boys can do this. I knew my girl’s capabilities,” he says. Nandi’s absolute conviction proved infectious.

It is post the CWG-medal that the coach was forced to take a step back. “Difficult vaults need close to 800-1000 repetitions to master them. She won a medal practising it 20-30 times. But she’d picked up a hairline crack at Glasgow, and had been competing under pain. I was relentless even though she would cry after sessions because she was hurting,” the coach recalls. That’s when Dipa cracked. “One day she got very angry and screamed at me and told me I was over-loading her sessions. She yelled, ‘I’m not a machine!’ That’s when it struck me that only she could understand how much pain she was in and that I should go easy on her,” the coach says. His wife, also a gymnastics coach, urged patience with the youngster.

On the right track

However, Nandi’s constantly ticking brain has started the one-year countdown to the 2015 World Championships at Glasgow which serve as qualifiers for the Rio Games — a springboard to Dipa’s Olympic dreams. At Nanning last week in this edition of the Worlds, Karmakar scored 15.100 on the Produnova — a reassurance from international judges that she’s on the right path. “There were more than 70 countries, and I’m glad I haven’t fizzled out and the CWG medal wasn’t a one-off. This gives me great confidence,” Dipa says. Over the two vaults, Dipa averaged 14.483, to end up in reserves for the final — India’s first.

The plan, though, is to shore up D-levels of the first vault that Dipa performs, so that the average automatically shoots up. The coach is once again setting the bar higher. Currently, Dipa starts competition with a 5.20 difficulty-worth Kim, a Tsukahara tucked or stretched full twist. Nandi is keen on attempting a more complicated variant — a Zamolodchikova, which at D-levels of 6.30 involves a double turn on dismount. The half-turn onto the horse and a complete back salto with a 360 degree turn around the vertical axis which she earlier threw, is now upgraded to a 720 degree turn around the vertical axis. “On the Produnova, with better execution, she can increase her scores by 0.8 or 0.9 and go up to 15.900. If she gets 15.000 on her first vault, she’ll have a very good score to work with,” the coach explains.

Jim Holt, India’s foreign expert and a respected voice in world gymnastics reckons the Produnova might get devalued from 7.0 to 6.5 in the coming years because US, China and Russia believe it’s thriving on a loophole. However, he’s impressed with what Nandi has achieved with Karmakar. “I think Nandi has done a careful and strategically astute job balancing risk (of injury) and reward (of high scores) with an athlete who has not fully mastered the element, but is one of the few women on the planet capable of “approaching” landing. I like his progressions and I’m impressed with his 2014 calculations, and how they’ve turned out in “real-time” — CWG: 3rd, Asian Games: 4th, World Championship: top 10.”

For coach Nandi, who has been receiving pats on his back from fellow coaches world-over, launching his athlete into orbit is not good enough. He awaits the perfect landing, and will scour every little literature he can lay hands on to figure out solutions. Just like 40-odd years ago when he discovered a champion Russian and chased him down to learn more.

‘Dipa is great, but for India to succeed it must look beyond the specifics’

Jim Holt has coached 8 nations at a dozen World Championships over the last two decades, developing gymnastics in far-flung corners. Currently, employed by the Sports Authority of India, the former University of Washington coach has been overseeing the Indian programme. Based out of New Delhi, and frequenting the NIS in Patiala for conducting coaches courses, the American from Seattle puts into perspective Dipa Karmakar’s performances this season, but urges that much more needs to be done if gymnastics has to become a mass-sport that consistently fetches medals for India.

I can state with certainty, given that I’m well connected internationally that Dipa Karmakar is currently one of the best-known female vaulters in the world. It is a testimony to her achievement and to coach Nandi’s ambition that she has accomplished a bronze medal at Commonwealth Games and finished 10th (by far highest placing of all gymnasts in India’s history — men or women) at the 2014 World Championships on this event.

Dipa is a remarkable young woman with extreme determination and a great, and I mean great work ethic. I have told her, and she has laughed at me on several of these occasions, that “I wish she were a guy.” Her grit and determination are motivating and inspiring for any coach.

In India, the challenge has been to change the culture from “good enough is good enough” to “how and what do we need to do to truly be world class”… The answer the world over, and what I’ve tried to share with the coaches and athletes in this country is, “get off your bottom and get up on the apparatus”. No one ever has to say that to Dipa, she’s always up on the apparatus. And that is what makes her the greatest female gymnast and the highest ranking India world gymnast in history.

If you’re asking “can she qualify for the Olympics in 2016?” I suspect the answer would be No, due to the weakness in her bar exercise. But Indians must understand she is attempting to qualify against gymnasts from counties that have established gymnastics traditions dating back 100 years, and Federations which have vast resources. Dipa is one girl from Tripura, who is confronting hoardes of gymnasts from the USA, Russia, Romania, China, Europe.

Indians have no concept of how astonishing it is that this Indian woman, with no background, no tradition, and such limited resources available, has a 10th place ranking in her best event in the world. USA Gymnastics’ (current team Gold medalists at the World Championships) annual budget exceeds $27 million a year. Gymnastics Federation of India? Not quite so much.

Though a coach like Nandi has taken steps that are significant and beneficial for his gymnast, I feel very (very) strongly that it is a mistake for SAI or Gymnastics Federation of India, or followers of gymnastics in India to concentrate on specific individuals or specific accomplishments.

I’ve been involved at the highest international level of the sport for a quarter century and have contributed to producing numerous Olympians and one World medallist. I say it again that India could and should be a world power in gymnastics within the next 10 years.

But in order to do so, this country needs to take an inventory of its strengths (many), weaknesses (numerous), set some specific goals with specific deadlines, develop a long-term strategic plan which is directed towards outcome goals, ruthlessly purge the naysayers and reactionaries, and urge the gymnasts to “get off their bottoms and get up on the apparatus.”

Indian gymnastics is not and should not be Dipa Karmakar and Ashish Kumar. There are a couple thousand kids (in at least 24 or 25 of the states) right now that are India’s future pipeline. I drool over the prospect of young talent — some unknown to Indians.

Personally when I think of Dipa attempting the difficult Produnova, I do not think skills should be competed without achieving mastery of the same. That said, I only have the highest personal regard, respect, admiration and affection for Dipa. I’ll repeat — I wish she could compete for the men and I’m totally serious about that. Heck, I’d put her on the men’s floor and vault team tomorrow if the rules would allow, she is a beast! And I mean that in the most serious and best way. I respect Nandi’s strategy and choice “for his gymnast”, but it’s not a viable strategy for building a national program which India so desperately needs.