Gymnasts brace up for challenge against all odds

NEW DELHI: Ashish Kumar's silver medal and a bronze in the 2010 Commonwealth Games followed by another silver medal in the Guangzhou Asian Games was supposed to be the turning point for the sport in the country. But neither the sport made progress nor the federation made efforts to popularize gymnastics at the grassroots level.
What made it worse was the de-recognition of the Gymnastics Federation of India (GFI) by the sports ministry in August 2012 due to internal dispute and mismanagement.Between October 2011 and August 2013, the gymnasts got no international exposure. It is only in the last three months that the gymnasts have been training under the foreign coach Jim Holt.
The only perfor mance they can garner confidence from came in the Commonwealth Gymnastics Championship held in Perth (Scotland) in April this year, where they bagged 3 gold medals, 3 silver and a bronze.
Ashish excelled in his main CWG event floor exercise and vault while leading female gymnast Dipa Karmakar bagged the yellow metal in vault event.
The Indian gymnasts had requested for a training stint in France where they had trained prior to the 2010 CWG Games but was later rejected by SAI due to lack of funds. Coach GS Bawa agreed that a lot of time has been lost. "There has been no foreign exposure which is important for their confidence. It will definitely affect our perfor mance," he reportedly said.