Stats: Analysing the scores of Dipa Karmakar's competitors at the Rio 2016 vault finals

Dipa Karmakar’s scores on the Vault were good enough for Commonwealth Games gold, will it be good enough for Olympics gold?

Hong Un-Jong

Hong (centre) after beating Biles and Skinner at Nanning

The North Korean who beat Biles at the 2014 Nanning World Championships is one of the more real threats to Karmakar’s claim to a silver, because Hong, like the Indian gymnast is singularly devoted to the vault.

In 2014, she accomplished two very difficult vaults and managed to outdo Biles’s near-perfect execution scores by almost 0.8 points that Hong gained in difficulty scoring. This means, that like Dipa, Hong’s strength lies in difficulty and not execution.

This is something she certainly exploited in the Olympic qualifiers where she scored 15.683, besting her Beijing gold-winning total of 15.650. However, Hong has been keenly working on perfecting her execution scores and often reached the top 9s these days.