Bhubaneswar: Pranati Nayak did Odisha and India proud by clinching a bronze medal in the vault final at the 12th Senior Women’s Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships in South Korea’s Jecheon on Saturday.
Pranati scored 13.466 points to finish third behind Chinese gold-medallist Yihan Zhang (13.650) and Vietnam’s Thi Quynh Nhu Nguyen (silver with 13.583).
Another Indian competitor, 21-year-old Protistha Samanta, narrowly missed a medal as she finished fourth with a score of 13.016 at the Jecheon Gymnasium.
Pranati, who represented India in the Tokyo Olympics, scored a strong 13.666 in her first vault attempt in the final, but a 12.866 thereafter pulled down her overall score.
Born in Jhargram, the 30-year-old Pranati represents Odisha in national meets and trains at the Odisha AM/NS India Gymnastics HPC.
Olympian Pranati had won bronze at the FIG World Cup in Turkey’s Antalya three months ago.
On Saturday, she clinched third medal at the Asian championships, surpassing Dipa Karmakar’s feat of two medals. Pranati’s earlier medals in the vault came at the 2019 edition in Ulaanbaatar and in 2022 in Doha – both bronze.
Dipa, on the other hand, won a vault bronze at the 2015 Hiroshima meet, followed by gold in Tashkent last year.
