Call it an unfair bias, but I’ve never been much of a fan of such sports as shooting and archery. I mean, I have enormous respect for Limba Ram and Abhinav Bindra and many others like them. I have no doubt that their achievements are just rewards for long years of training and a fierce single-mindedness about their craft.

Yet to me, the word “sports" has always implied running about, sweat, exhaustion—and, in fact, all those together. Thus, races (100m, marathon) or tennis or swimming or the high jump—these are what I think of as sports. Unfair? Perhaps. But I never was quite able to see shooting a gun the same way—and this, despite being the nephew of someone who narrowly missed being an Olympic shooter for India.

And so, I never was able to get excited about Bindra’s and Rajyavardhan Rathore’s Olympic medals. Power to them, certainly, but if it’s Indian Olympic success I want to see or relive, I’d pick Leander Paes winning his bronze in tennis at the 1996 Games, or Milkha Singh narrowly missing a medal in 1960. I’d hope for more Indians to participate and win medals in track and field, or basketball, or judo.

Or gymnastics.

Which is why I’m so delighted that a young woman from Tripura, Dipa Karmakar, will represent India in artistic gymnastics at the Rio Olympics. It’s quite a milestone, actually: she is the first Indian woman to have qualified for gymnastics at the Olympics.

No, I know very little about gymnastics—not even exactly what artistic gymnastics is and how it differs from, well, whatever non-artistic gymnastics is. But I have watched plenty of gymnasts, both on television in various competitions and while practising.

There are famous names like Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian sensation who wowed the world at the 1976 Olympic Games. Or Mary Lou Retton, the tiny American who lit up the 1984 edition. There’s Mohini Bhardwaj, she of a Russian mother and an Indian father, who helped her US team win a silver at the 2004 Games.

But while those and other Olympian gymnasts are something else to watch—check YouTube for plenty of highlights—I remember too the unknowns. Like some I used to see at regular practice at the University of Texas facilities, on my way to an indoor badminton court there.

I could never resist stopping for a few minutes to watch them: several young men and women, prancing and leaping and somersaulting all over an expanse of foam mattresses that filled a large room.

There was something irresistibly attractive about their routines. Was it their compact and thoroughly beautiful bodies—the strong shoulders, the toned thighs, the long and muscled backs? Was it their lithe gait as they walked about? Was it the remarkable moves they pulled off with almost nonchalant ease?

Or was it envy? Was it the knowledge that I would never find that fine-tuned combination of grace, strength and athleticism that these kids displayed so routinely?

Some would be on the parallel bars, doing things on them that seemed scarcely credible: twists and turns and flips, all with legs perfectly coordinated down to straightened ankles and toes.

One muscled man liked the rings: most times that I stopped there, he was hanging from them, perfecting some move that I find impossible to describe adequately.

Tiny women ran down a long track along one wall of the room, took off from a springboard and vaulted over a large cushioned apparatus, pushing off with their hands as they went.

Others did floor exercises, prances that turned to handstands that turned to splits in the air and precise landings.

I didn’t know then and I still don’t know what all these moves are called. All I know is that it was always difficult to tear myself away and proceed to the badminton court, where I’d feel oddly clumsy for the first several minutes.

Athletes do some amazing things in their respective sports—think of a Monfils in tennis, a Michael Jordan in basketball, a Dhyan Chand in hockey. But for my money, nobody combines athleticism with beauty like a good gymnast does. That’s why I find it such a compelling sport.

And it’s something that Karmakar has gone so far in a country without much of a history of gymnastics. I mean, there must be places where I can find young Indian women and men practising their moves, speaking gymnastically of course. Only, I don’t know of any.

Perhaps there are some in Agartala, Karmakar’s home town. No doubt there’s a stream of journalists making there way there right now, to find out more about where she learnt her craft.

As some articles about Karmakar have already pointed out, she is only the third woman gymnast to have actually pulled off, in competition, a difficult and dangerous manoeuvre called the Produnova. It’s named for the gymnast who first performed it, a talented Russian called Yelena Produnova.

It’s officially known as a “handspring double front vault", and if “Produnova" rolls off the tongue more easily, also hiding behind those words is a breathtaking package of speed, strength, flexibility and guts.

The gymnast must fairly fly down the track, leap emphatically onto the springboard, push off the vault with her hands, coil herself into a tight ball to conserve angular momentum, soar through the air while rotating head-over-heels twice, and land on her feet.

If she misses any part of that sequence, she might land on her neck or back. She might break her spine.

At the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Karmakar simply nailed the Produnova. She knew it the instant she landed.

Nail it again at Rio, Dipa! And if you and the Produnova turn us into a nation of whirling, soaring gymnasts, I won’t complain.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun

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