A family of world record holders

An eight-year-old girl from the city has excelled in gymnastics and set three world records.

Deeksha Girish performed the most number of forward rolls in an hour, and took the shortest time to finish 100 metres in forward rolls. The third record is for being the fastest to complete 10 metres in the box-split position. Her achievements go into the Guinness Records.

This makes her the third member of her family to enter the Guinness registry. The family tally of entries comes to nine. This is just the beginning and Deeksha will win many more records in the days to come, said her father Girish Kumar, popularly known as ‘Guinness Girish’.
Girish holds five records, one of them for outdoing himself by opening 63 beer bottles with his teeth in one minute.

His 14-year-old-daughter Tejaswini holds the record for passing the longest string through her nose and pulling it out of her mouth in 30 seconds. Manjula, his wife, too attempted a record to break the most number of eggs with her toes, but her accomplishment is yet to be certified by Guinness.

The previous world record for the most number of forward rolls in an hour was held by Ashrita Furman, now 62. The US citizen took the title in 2007 by completing 1,330 rolls. Deeksha doubled the record by doing 2,787.

The task was a breeze for Deeksha, who beat the previous record with 32 minutes and 23 seconds to spare. Her older sister Tejaswini sat by the track and spoke words of encouragement as she rolled closer to her target.

Deeksha completed 10 metres in the box-split position in 10.96 seconds, breaking the previous record set by Kazumi Kawahara of Japan, who had done it in 16.90 seconds.

It took Deeksha 48.57 seconds to do 100 metres in forward rolls. The previous record holder had taken 53 seconds.

Rejected for skin colour

A Class IV student, Deeksha wants to be a gymnast like Dipa Karmakar and go to the Olympics.“Deeksha auditioned to perform gymnastics for an advertisement, but they rejected her, saying she was not fair enough. She was crying, so I told her she would achieve bigger things,” Girish said.