The Charge of the Young Brigade

At the 52nd Junior National Aquatics Championships in Bhubaneswar, two names sit at the very top of the Best Swimmer boards — in brackets built, on paper, to keep them separate from swimmers up to two years older. Saanvi Deshwal (Maharashtra) took five golds in Girls I(B), her second straight Best Swimmer title in that bracket — the only repeat performance in three years of results we’ve tracked across this age group. Sharan S (Karnataka), born 2011 and racing a bracket otherwise filled with 2010-born rivals, swept every individual freestyle distance on the card — 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m and 1500m, all gold. Two swimmers, racing fields stacked against them by age alone, and winning anyway.

How the brackets actually work

Junior Nationals splits its age groups into I(A) and I(B) — I(A) the older half of the category, I(B) the younger — and each band is wide enough to span two birth years. That’s the quiet mechanic sitting underneath a result like Sharan S’s: at I(B) this year, a 2011-born swimmer was racing 2010-born rivals who are, in age-group swimming, a meaningful stretch further into growth and training age. As we reported when the SFI’s age-band and National Talent Pool Development Program revisions landed, the federation’s own qualifying standards get tightest in exactly this window — which makes winning as the youngest swimmer on the blocks, rather than just qualifying, the harder number to put up.

Sharan S: every stroke was freestyle, every distance was his

The sweep holds up event by event: gold in the 100m Free (53.57), the 200m Free (1:54.19), the 400m Free (4:00.86), the 800m Free (8:23.78) and the 1500m Free (15:48.07) — five individual freestyle golds, five different distances, one swimmer. Nobody else in the Boys I(B) field managed more than one individual freestyle title. It’s the kind of sweep that would be a strong meet even without the two-year age gap attached to it.

Saanvi Deshwal: this isn’t a one-year story

Deshwal’s 2026 title — five golds in Girls I(B) — is notable on its own, but it’s the second half of a pattern: she also took Best Swimmer honours in the same bracket in 2025, with five golds and three national records that year. Two straight years atop the same bracket is a level of continuity nothing else in our three-year Best Swimmer dataset matches — every other bracket has changed hands year to year, sometimes even state to state. Whatever else moves in Indian age-group swimming between now and next season, Deshwal enters as the only swimmer defending a title rather than chasing one.

Stack the boards, and the picture sharpens

Put the I(A) and I(B) Best Swimmer boards for 2026 side by side, and the two younger-bracket winners top the combined list on the numbers we have. Boys I(A)’s top performer, Tirthank Pegu (Assam), took 3 gold and 1 silver; Sharan S’s 5 golds beat that outright. Girls I(A)’s Sri Charani Tumu (Karnataka) took 4 golds; Deshwal’s 5 edges past her too. That’s not a perfect apples-to-apples read — SFI’s results books don’t give us full event-by-event times for the I(A) field the way they do for I(B), so a genuine time-for-time comparison across brackets (would Sharan S’s 53.57 in the 100m Free have medalled in I(A)’s deeper, older field?) isn’t something we can stand behind from the documents on hand, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What the gold-count comparison does support, honestly: on the medal count alone, this year’s two best storylines in Junior swimming both came from the younger half of the category, not the older one — which is the more unusual result of the two.

Two years of data, not one

*2024’s brackets were run as a combined Sub-Junior/Junior meet, labelled I/II/III; the row above is the closest Junior-equivalent band — a pinch of salt on any strict year-on-year read against 2025/2026.

Read down the Girls I(B) column and the throughline is obvious: Dhinidhi Desinghu, then Deshwal, then Deshwal again — the bracket has produced a genuine standout every year we have data for, which says as much about the depth of competition it takes to win it as it does about any individual swimmer.

The Sub-Junior mirror

Drop one level, to the 42nd Sub-Junior National Aquatic Championships in Jaipur, and the same younger-band-versus-older-band structure exists — Group II is the older Sub-Junior half, Group III the younger — but this year it tells almost the opposite story. Among the 2026 Sub-Junior Best Swimmers, the older Group II produced the bigger gold hauls: M. Abdul Hafeez (Tamil Nadu) with 5 golds in Boys II, and Divashree Kesavan (Tamil Nadu) with 5 golds in Girls II. The younger Group III’s standouts won on a different metric entirely — Avinash Nishad (SSCB) took 4 golds and a national record in Boys III, and Myra Singh Sadh (Delhi) took 4 golds, a bronze, and four national records in Girls III. Four records from one swimmer is the standout number in the entire 2026 results book, junior or sub-junior — Sadh isn’t winning by the widest medal margin at her level, but by how many marks she’s rewriting while doing it.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment: at the Junior level this year, the “two years younger” story was about winning more; at the Sub-Junior level, it’s about a younger swimmer rewriting the record book instead. Different kind of case for the same underlying point — the depth in this pipeline doesn’t wait for swimmers to age into the older bracket before it shows up.

(M. Abdul Hafeez was one of the names SwimmingDrive flagged in “20 Under 20” back in May, tipped as “racing age groups above his own” — a call that held up in Jaipur. Fuller Junior Watch check-in on that list ran alongside our Karnataka Junior Nationals coverage.)

The names next in line

None of Nishad, Sadh or Kesavan are old enough to race I(B) yet. On current form, at least one of them arrives there with a target on their back — which is exactly the position Sharan S and Saanvi Deshwal are in right now, a level up.