The Swimming Federation of India (SFI) recently announced the dates for its annual marquee competition, the Sub Junior & the Junior National Competition. The competition will be held in Bangalore (or Bengaluru) in October. Ideally, this announcement would have accompanied a lot of cheer and excitement, mainly because the event takes place after a year’s gap. Back in 2020, the national competition had been canceled due to the Covid-19 epidemic and justifiably so.
Swimming as a sport has been the worst sporting victim of the Pandemic. As the Covid-19 raged across India, swimming pools across the nation were the first to shut and the last to open. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months as swimmers across the country rallied for the reopening of the pools. Even elite swimmers who wished to participate in the Tokyo Olympics found themselves in a lurch and beseeched the sporting authorities to reopen the pools, at least for competitive swimmers. The Olympic probables had to try every jugaad in the book, from moving to other cities to shifting base outside the country for practice. Somehow they managed.
In this context, the resumption of national competition should have been a much welcome move, a breath of fresh air, a relief of sorts. Except it is nothing of that sort.
The sudden announcement by SFI has sent swimmers and their respective parents in a tizzy as they try to figure out how to participate in the championship. The primary reason for this discord is that swimming pools are still not open in many states or cities. Take the case of Maharashtra; the swimming pools had briefly opened up for competitive swimmers above 12 years of age in February and then shut down again in March-end as the second wave of the Pandemic started. Since then till date, swimming pools haven’t reopened to their total capacity. Only a few private pools have opened up, where only a handful of swimmers have been able to practice and only for a limited timespan. Parents of swimmers are running helter-skelter, trying to find a pool so that their wards can practice. On the other hand, influential people, including the likes of Virdhawal Khade and Monal Choksi (Secretary, SFI), are posting tweets to CM of Maharashtra, Udhav Thackeray, requesting for pools to open up.
In stark contrast, the pools in Bangalore have been running full-swing for over a month now. As a result, the swimmers from Karnataka are in much better shape and better prepared for the swimming competition. The scenario is so confusing that many swimmers from Maharashtra have shifted base to Bangalore to practice. Glenmark Aquatic Foundation of GAF used to run an academy in Mumbai and have now shifted base to Bangalore. India’s leading swimmer Virdhawal Khade also found it challenging to find a pool to train, first training at a pool in Thane, then moved on to Chennai and now to Vadodara Gujarat for training. Many swimmers from influential families have already shifted overseas and are training in centers like Dubai, Singapore, or Thailand.
As a result, there is a yawning disparity between the level of swimmers that have access to the pool and thus have been training for some time and those unable to find a swimming pool to train. Any sporting event in swimming as a sport needs adequate preparations. With pools not yet open uniformly, the competition at the national championship will be very lopsided, with certain swimmers having all the advantages while the rest having none. In this light, will it be fair to hold a national competition of such magnitude unless it is ensured that all the swimming pools in all the states are open?
The big question is, a national competition that takes place only once a year, will it be fair to the vast majority who cannot prepare due to the Pandemic?
Should not the competition be deferred to a date when all the pools across the nation are uniformly open, and swimmers have equal opportunity to compete and score?
It is imperative to understand the importance of this competition. There is only one such event on a national scale where swimmers get a chance to compete and win laurels. Often, swimmers spend a whole year or two in preparation for this event. While there are no cash prizes on offer for the medallist, the winners at this competition can avail of many associated benefits, like job postings under sports quota or additional marks in board exams. Also, whatever little investment that is made on competitive swimmers is made based on their performance at the national competitions. Thus to be eligible for FINA or GAF scholarships or even corporate sponsorship by JSW and rest, a swimmer needs to have a respectable showing at these events.
If held as per schedule, the current national championship will be catastrophic for many budding swimmers. As it is, they have been struggling to find a way to practice, and then when they are faced with a handful of contestants that are going to bag all the laurels, it can be very disheartening. When a swimmer loses badly, they will blame themselves, not the lack of proper training.
And to add misery to the madness, the federation has been completely unimaginative in its approach. The format of the competition has also not been tweaked to favor swimmers in India. We still have 3-year age groups (Group 2 and Group 1). For the sake of promoting the sports, it should have ideally been run as a single-year age grouping. This would have ensured more medal winners and, thus, more encouragement.
The quintessential problem in swimming stems from how it is regulated and run; there are multiple associations at loggerheads. In all this confusion, the swimmers and parents are forced into a “survival of the fittest” scenario, where they are constantly trying to score over each other, fairly or unfairly.
And that gets us to the fundamental question, a national competition which only favors a few, should it be held at all? With the Covid-19 sword still hanging over the head, will such an event entail travel from different parts of India to Bangalore not be a health risk?
If the 2020 Tokyo Olympics could be held in 2021, why can’t the Glenmark 37th Sub-Junior & 47th Junior National Aquatic Championship shifts to another date? Why can’t there be two national championships held in a single calendar year like 2022?