Star gymnast Dipa Karmakar will compete at the Senior Artistic Gymnastics National Championships after a gap of eight years here next week.
The prestigious event will be held here from January 2 to 4.
Besides Dipa, the championship will feature the likes of Tokyo Olympian Pranati Nayak, Yogeshwar Singh, Rakesh Patra, Saif Tamboli, Gaurav Kumar among others.
“Dipa will compete at the Senior nationals. The last time she had participated at the domestic event was in 2015. This will be her last nationals,” her coach Bisweswar Nandi said.
The 30-year-old from Agartala, the first female gymnast from India to compete in the Olympics, was ignored for the Asian Games despite topping the trials as she didn’t meet SAI’s selection criteria of players needing to score equivalent to the eighth-ranked gymnast in the last Asian Games.
It was since then that she couldn’t participate in any event following her 21-month suspension due to a doping violation.
Nandi, however, hasn’t given up hope on his ward’s chances of qualifying for the Paris Olympics. Dipa is recovering from a nagging knee issue for quite some time now.
“She is gradually reaching her 100 per cent and will compete in few international events next year. Of course, she will have to do well in the selection trials to be in the Indian team,” Nandi said.
Odisha is all geared up to host the Junior and Senior Artistic Gymnastics National Championships at the Gymnastics Centre in the Kalinga Stadium.
The Junior Championship will begin on Thursday, followed by the Senior Championship from January 2.
A total of 550 players will take part in the championship.
3-member ad hoc panel
New Delhi: The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) on Wednesday constituted a new three-member ad hoc committee to run the day-to-day affairs of the WFI after the sports ministry suspended the wrestling national body for not following the provisions of its constitution while taking decisions.
The Wushu Association of India president Bhupinder Singh Bajwa will be the chairman of the panel with hockey Olympian M M Somaya and former international shuttler Manjusha Kanwar being the other two members.
However, in a letter to the IOA president PT Usha, written on Wednesday, the WFI claimed that the formation of the committee was illegal and hence was rejected by it.
The Sports Ministry on Sunday suspended the WFI, three days after it elected new office bearers with Brij Bhushan Singh loyalist Sanjay Singh as president, and also asked IOA to constitute an ad-hoc panel to manage the affairs of the sports body.
The IOA said that the newly-elected president and officials of WFI have made arbitrary decisions in violation of their own constitutional provisions and also flouted principles of good governance.
“The IOA has recently become aware that the recently appointed president and officials of WFI have made arbitrary decisions...against the principles of good governance espoused by IOC and further without following due process overturned the rulings of the IOA-appointed ad hoc committee (on December21),” Usha said in the release.
PTI
