Pranati Nayak secures bronze medal at Artistic Gymnastics World Cup 2024; Dipa Karmakar settles with fifth position
The FIG Apparatus World Cup 2024 series started the Cairo leg as India’s Pranati Nayak bagged a bronze medal in the women’s vault event on February 17, Saturday.
The other three legs of the World Cup 2024 series will be held in Cottbus, Germany (February 22 to 25), Baku, Azerbaijan (March 7 to 10) and Doha, Qatar (April 17 to 20). It’s important to note that all four legs of this year’s FIG World Cup Series will act as qualifying events for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The scoring system will take into account the top three performances from the four qualifying events. For each World Cup Series, the two highest-ranked gymnasts per gender, who meet the eligibility criteria and have not yet qualified, will secure the Paris 2024 Olympics Quota.
In Cairo 2024, India’s Pranati Nayak qualified for the vault final after securing the seventh spot in the qualifiers with an aggregate score of 13.166. In the final medal round that took place on February 17, Saturday, Pranati finished third after improvising her score to 13.620.
An Chang-Ok (14.230) of the Democratic People's Republic Korea clinched the gold medal while Bulgarian gymnast Valentina Georgieva bagged silver, also with 13.620.
Interestingly, Georgieva also had the same score as Pranati but the Bulgarian finished ahead of the Indian Gymnast based on technicality.
Dipa Karmakar finishes in the fifth position
Meanwhile, Olympian Dipa Karmakar, who returned to the international stage after five years, finished at the fifth rank in the same event.
Dipa Karmakar, who narrowly missed a bronze and finished in the fourth slot at the Rio 2016 Olympics, also made it to the medal round after finishing third with 13.449 points. However, she could only finish in the fifth position in the final with a score of 13.380.
Pranati Nayak became only the third Indian to win a medal at the FIG World Cup series. Aruna Reddy secured a bronze medal in vault at Melbourne 2018. In the same year, Dipa Karmakar clinched a gold in vault at Mersin and bronze at Cottbus.