Any swimmer who has participated in a competition yearns for a podium finish. There is just no other way to put it. Years of toil in the pool and outside materialises in an explosion at the meet, with glory as the icing on the cake. Most of the time, the glory is limited to simple medals and certificates. In rare exceptions, these medals also carry with them some monetary rewards. Beyond this, a swimmer in India, who gets a medal in a handful of swimming meets, gets nothing — except the fleeting moments of glory as they gleam at the mass of parents thronging the pool. Rarely is there any press coverage, and even rarer is a published image.
So, what drives the competitive swimmers in India, then? What keeps them going on in a relentless pursuit of perfection?
Hope — it is hope that keeps the swimmer and their family going on. The expectation of winning a Khelo India scholarship, the lure of the sports quota in educational institutions and the ambition of making an ‘A’ cut are what propels them.
A Tough Sport
Swimming is a brutal sport — where margins between a winner and loser are smaller than a blink of an eyelid. The competitions are usually dominated by a set of swimmers who have been able to hone their skills a tad better or have been lucky enough to be coached by an involved trainer. Thus the podium-finishers club is tiny and limited. This can be a double-edged sword; while the club members constantly strive (harder) to retain their membership, the claimants who are unable to make a cut — feel demotivated and left out.
It is not easy to be motivated if you always end up as fourth/fifth or beyond that. And as a result, the people who manage the affairs of swimming in different states have decided to set things right in their way. Thus, a whole set of competitions, which would have been places where these swimming matadors preened in front of the crowd, have started barring them out. Plenty of swimming meets now have been declared as “non-medallist” meets, meaning if a swimmer has won any medal at national or state-level competition, he or she would not be allowed to participate.
The guiding principle behind this exclusion is to give the second rung of swimmers a chance — who would have, in all likelihood, lost to the podium-finishers. The latest example is the short course competition held in Karnataka, where any medallist was disallowed to participate. The circular justified this nonadmission by mentioning that this was done to “provide opportunities & motivate second-line swimmers“.
While at first glance, it does seem like a good move, on a deeper look, it does open up a whole vista of concerns. The first and most obvious one is whether merit and hard work should be penalised for the sake of the greater good. The medallist or the podium-finishers have invested their blood, sweat and tears (not to forget oodles of money from their families) in being where they are. It is no accident that they are winning — it is their application. Should we then penalise them for the very thing that they are good at?
In India, swimming is yet to be mainstream, so only a handful of consequential meets take place over a year. These competitions also allow swimmers to benchmark themselves against their peers — it propels them to work harder on their respective strokes. By denying the swimmers an opportunity to compete, their growth is hampered.
And more importantly, it brings us to the essential question — Indian swimmers have not made many headwinds in the international arena. The best we have is the two A-Cut timings by Sajjan Prakash and Srihari Nataraj. We need a whole legion of enthused and overtly competitive swimmers to break the glass ceiling — to shine at international meets. To do so, we must nurture and promote these young novilleros and hope they turn into shiny matadors. Debarring them will discourage these swimmers and only bring down the level. After all, if you get to compete only a few times in a year, how will you hone your skill sets? How will you bolster that killer instinct?
The only possible solution is that of co-existence. While it is critical to promote the second line of swimmers and turn them into winners so that the podium-finishers club is expanded, it should not be at the cost of medallist swimmers. Rather than barring the medallist from existing meets, would it not make more sense to create newer meets targeted at non-medallists? Instead of reducing the opportunities, how about creating a whole lot more? A move like this would benefit all — the clubs, the coaches, the swimmers and their medal-hungry parents.
Sadly, this requires a bit of out-of-box thinking — after all, it is much easier to destroy than to create. We need imagination and innovation to boost swimming as a sport in India — till then, the medallist, especially the younger ones, will suffer and feel accursed.