Cairo, Feb 18:
India’s Pranati Nayak won the bronze medal in the women’s vault event at the FIG Artistic Gymnastics Apparatus World Cup 2024 in Cairo, Egypt on Saturday.
Pranati’s fellow Olympian Dipa Karmakar, meanwhile, finished fifth in the same event, marking her return to the international stage after five years.
The Cairo meet is the first leg of the FIG Apparatus World Cup 2024 series, which encompasses four different tournaments. The remaining three legs will be held in Cottbus, Germany (February 22 to 25), Baku, Azerbaijan (March 7 to 10) and Doha, Qatar (April 17 to 20).
All four legs of this year’s FIG World Cup series are qualifying events for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics.
Points from the best three performances out of the four qualifying events will be considered. The two highest-ranked gymnasts per gender for each apparatus, provided they have not previously qualified and are eligible, will obtain Paris 2024 Olympic quotas via this path.
At the FIG World Cup Cairo 2024, Tokyo Olympian Pranati Nayak qualified for the vault final after finishing seventh in the qualifiers with an aggregate score of 13.166. In the medal round on Saturday, Pranati improved her score to 13.620 and finished third.
The Democratic People’s Republic Korea’s An Chang-Ok (14.230) took the gold medal while Bulgarian gymnast Valentina Georgieva clinched silver, also with 13.620. Though Georgieva had the same score as Pranati, the Bulgarian finished ahead of the Indian based on technicality.
Dipa Karmakar, who narrowly missed a bronze at the Rio 2016 Olympics, also made the cut for Saturday’s medal round, finishing third with 13.449 points but could only finish fifth in the final with a score of 13.380.
Only the top eight from qualifying made the final.
With the win in Cairo, Pranati Nayak became only the third Indian to win a medal at the FIG World Cup series. Aruna Reddy, bronze in vault at Melbourne 2018, and Dipa Karmakar, vault gold at Mersin and bronze at Cottbus in the same year, are the previous winners.
None of the other Indians in action in Cairo made the medal round. Ritu Das finished 45th in the women’s balance beam qualifying.
In the men’s events, India’s Ujwal Naidu finished 58th in the floor exercise and 40th in the vault, Tapan Mohanty was 31st in rings and 38th in parallel bars while Rakesh Patra finished 20th in rings.
