Indian woman gymnast Dipa Karmakar failed to win a medal at Rio Olympics, but came a creditable fourth with a score of 15.066 in the women's vault final at Rio on Sunday.
Simone Biles of the United States won gold with a score of 15.966. Maria Paseka of Russia claimed the silver (15.253) and Giulia Steingruber of Switzerland (15.216) won the bronze.
Karmakar had become the first Indian woman gymnast to qualify for Olympics by finishing ninth with a score of 14.850 in the first of the four subdivisions of the women's artistic category.
The 22-year-old had also caught attention for performing the risky Produnova vault—a double-front somersault which has the highest degree of difficultly for a women's vault. The Produnova vault is named after Russian gymnast Elena Produnova, who first landed it in 1999.
Daughter of a weightlifting coach in Agartala, Karmakar, the youngest of two sisters, started gymnastics at the age of three under Suma, wife of her current coach Bishweshwar Nandi. Suma is a Sports Authority of India coach.
Karmakar had been training long and hard to qualify for Rio. She almost succeeded at the World Championships last November, but ended up missing the podium. However, a fine performance in the final qualifying-cum-test event in Rio clinched the berth.
In July, the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique named her ‘world-class gymnast' for her fifth-place finish at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow last October. She had won bronze in the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2015 Asian Championships.
