Tokyo 2020: Finals first on Pranati Nayak’s radar

Mention paan and Pranati Nayak collapses into giggles. “I like them but it’s not a habit. Sometimes, I buy six or seven mitha (sweet) ones from melas and munch them on the way home.” The last time she indulged herself was at a friend’s wedding in December, said the gymnast. It will stay that way for a while.

Nayak’s life changed in April when it became clear that the 2021 senior Asian Championship in gymnastics, an Olympic qualifying event, will be cancelled because of the pandemic (it was officially called off in May). For Nayak, that meant a ticket to Tokyo in the Asian quota as the second reserve behind Sri Lanka’s Elpitiya Gehani.

To get her ready, an exclusive bio-secure bubble was created at the eastern centre of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) in Kolkata. Nayak and a team of nine including a chef, masseur, physiotherapist, coach and manager moved in on May 4. “Had she not been alone, even her mobile phone wouldn’t have been with her,” said her coach Lakhan Manohar Sharma.

“I need to go to bed at 10 because I have practice early in the morning,” was how Nayak prefaced this conversation on a late midweek evening. Training and recovery sessions now happen twice daily from Monday through Saturday though the intensity is not the same each day, said Sharma.

Till recently, Sharma and Nayak were focusing on the 2022 Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games.

The Olympics wasn’t on the radar because Nayak had faltered on the beam at the world championships in Stuttgart in October 2019—the last major international gymnastics event in a world before Covid-19. From going to Germany quietly confident of qualifying for Tokyo, Nayak had got off to the worst of starts. “And my hopes evaporated then and there,” she said.

“The beam was the first apparatus so I was feeling really low. But I told myself, ‘chalo’, the routine needs to be completed,” she said. On the phone, Nayak spoke rapidly in a child-like voice and often ended her sentences in Bangla with the rhetorical question “tai na? (isn’t it).” She said she had targeted a score of 48 in Stuttgart which would have sealed an Olympics berth. The stutter at the start meant she got 46.90.

“I don’t have much time and that made it difficult to live down the disappointment in Stuttgart,” said Nayak. She is 26 and said most gymnasts who had started with her have retired. “How long do you think I have, a year, maybe two and injuries are always one step away, tai na?”

At 24, Simone Biles, the world and Olympic champion who won four gold medals in the 2016 Olympics, has said she is “old.” The peak age for a gymnast, according to double Olympic gold medallist Max Whitlock, who, at 28, will represent Britain, is “about 22 or 23.”

It was in the last week of April, while she was at home in Pingla in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district that Nayak got to know that her Stuttgart score would keep the Olympics dream alive.

“My first reaction was this was God’s way of rewarding my love for gymnastics.”

It had been over four months that she had resumed training but with SAI closed most of the time, sessions were a challenge. “Online sessions have their limitations so we decided to train at local clubs in different areas of Kolkata. She would put up with friends,” said Sharma.

Among those who helped was former international gymnast Rakhi Debnath. “She let me stay with her for three months at her home and train at a club near her place in Barasat (around 20km from Kolkata),” said Nayak who, like Debnath, works with Indian Railways.

Sharma would accompany her to clubs for the sessions. “The apparatus wasn’t what you would have wanted but it was better than doing nothing,” he said.

All through 2020 which Nayak spent at home—“in a way it was great because I have never been home beyond 20 days at a stretch,” she said—she concentrated on the specific physical preparation that would help her stay in shape for her routines.

“I gain weight if I miss training by a few days but because I worked out at home, I am now at 47 kg, 1kg more than my optimum weight,” she said. Vaccinated for Covid-19 and ready for Tokyo, she is 46kg now, said Sharma.

Training at home happened through Sharma’s online classes. It meant using the far from shipshape take-off board Nayak’s father Sumanta, a former bus driver, had sourced and whatever else was available. Bamboo bars tied across trees were shorthand for uneven bars; a waist-high stool was used for jumping routines and 500ml bottles filled with water substituted for weights for hand and shoulder exercises. About the only thing, Nayak, a vault bronze medallist in the 2019 Asian championship, could do like she would at SAI were the handstand holds.

Because her training was so restricted for over a year, the load was increased gradually. “We tread very carefully,” said Sharma.

At 27, Sharma, who earned his coaching badge in 2016, is a year older than Nayak but kept referring to her as “bachcha” (child), as Indian coaches are wont to.

Practice on vault, floor exercise, uneven bars and balance beam—the four apparatus that comprise artistic gymnastics—are split into twice-daily sessions.

“Recovery is as important as training. For instance, you can improve on landing skills only if the physio has worked on the adductor muscles,” said Sharma. “Twice a week, we also analyse videos of her performance. She is strong on the vaulting table and our first target is to qualify for the finals.”