Cairo [Egypt], February 17 : Indian gymnast Pranati Nayak secured a bronze medal in the women's vault event at the FIG Artistic Gymnastics Apparatus World Cup being held in Cairo, Egypt on Saturday.
Fellow Indian Dipa Karmakar, making her return to international-level events after five years, finished in fifth spot, as per Olympics.com.
The Cairo meet is the first leg of the FIG Apparatus World Cup 2024 series, which has four different tournaments. The remainder of three legs will be held at: Cottbus, Germany (February 22 to 25), Baku, Azerbaijan (March 7 to 10) and Doha, Qatar (April 17 to 20). These are all events that will earn athletes qualification to the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Points from the best three performances out of four qualifying events will be considered for qualification to the Olympics. The two highest-ranked gymnasts per gender for each apparatus, having not qualified previously wil be getting the Olympic quotas.
Pranati secured qualification to vault final after a seventh-place finish in qualification round, with a score of 13.166. She finished third in the medal round with a much better score of 13.620.
North Korea's An Chang-Ok (14.230) secured the gold medal while the silver went to Bulgaria's Valentina Georgieva, with a score of 13.620, finishing ahead of Pranati on technicality.
Dipa also made it to the medal round but finished fifth with a score of 13.380. She had finished third in the qualification round with a better score of 13.449 points.
Only the top eight players from the qualification round made it to the final.
With this win, Pranati is only the third Indian to bag a medal in the FIG World Cup series, along with Aruna Reddy, bronze in vault at Melbourne 2018, and Dipa Karmakar, vault gold at Mersin and bronze at Cottbus in the same year,
Coming to the men's events, India's Ujwal Naidu finished 58th and 40th respectively in floor exercise and vault. Tapan Mohanty finished 31st in rings and 38th in parallel bars and Rakesh Patra earned 20th place finish in rings.
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