Why India Keeps Producing Great Swimmers in Spite of the System

India has produced swimmers who have touched Olympic qualifying standards — Sajan Prakash, Srihari Nataraj — but no Indian has made a swimming final at the Olympic Games. Gary Hall Sr., who has coached Indian swimmers over the years and watched the sport here from a distance, has a clear-eyed view of why. In the third part of our conversation, he maps the structural problems in Indian swimming, draws uncomfortable comparisons with the United States, and says something that should give every Indian swimming administrator pause: your best swimmers have succeeded in spite of the system, not because of it.

India’s competitive swimming base is small relative to its population. Where does the problem begin?

You have to go back to first principles: what is at the crux of the problem? Is it pools? Probably not — if ten to fifteen percent of your major cities have fifty-metre competition pools, that’s actually a reasonable number. So if it’s not pools, why aren’t more people participating in the sport?

Is it cost? Does it cost too much to join a competitive team? I think that’s part of it. And here in the United States we face a similar problem — we’re missing out on a huge opportunity by not allowing swimmers to participate at a lower, more accessible level. What I call the recreational or developmental swimmer. That’s the kid who only wants to swim twice a week for an hour, but also wants to play cricket or football on the other days. Every other sport accommodates that. In the US you put your kid in soccer — they go once a week, they have a game on Saturday, two hours, it’s done, everyone goes home. Try bringing a parent to a competitive swim meet. It’s a four-day event. Eight hours a day. And you get to see your child swim for three minutes total.

Swimming has made itself too difficult to enter. And the ones who pay the price for that are the swimmers who might have been great, who we never find.

So the depth of the base pool is the fundamental problem.

The United States has three hundred and fifty million people and approximately three hundred and fifty thousand competitive swimmers. Even with that base, even during the Michael Phelps era — when we had arguably the greatest Olympian in the history of any sport — we didn’t grow the sport. It stayed flat, maybe even declined slightly. That tells me USA Swimming, the governing body, is not getting something right. There’s a missed opportunity there.

And I’ve said publicly that our best American swimmers have succeeded in spite of the system, not because of it. I can almost make the same argument in the United States that you made about India. The difference is we have a much deeper base to find our superstars from. The deeper your base, the better your chance of finding that one exceptional talent. India’s base is a fraction of that — and that matters enormously at the elite level.

If you were trying to fix the system in India, where would you start?

Accessibility first. Make it possible for a kid to come once a week, pay a nominal amount, and just learn the fundamentals of how to move correctly in the water. Don’t demand five practices a week or nothing. Let them also play cricket. Let them also do other things. Build levels — once a week, twice a week, three times a week. Let the swimmer decide how far they want to go. Every other sport operates this way. Swimming has this all-or-nothing culture that is killing its own growth.

The second thing — and this is where coaches need to be honest with themselves — is technique. If I were coaching a team anywhere in the world, I would spend the first three weeks of every season doing no training at all. Just drills. Working on correct movement. Then I’d start building aerobic base, energy systems, physiology. But we’re so eager to fill every minute of every session with yardage that technique gets crowded out. Part of the problem is coaches don’t always know exactly what to teach. Part of it is they don’t value technique as highly as they should. And part of it is they genuinely don’t recognise the problems in front of them — which is exactly where technology like TRAC IQ can help.

What would it actually take for India to get a swimmer to an Olympic final?

First, identify the talent. Australia does this better than anyone. When they find a kid who could be genuinely fast, the entire system rallies around that swimmer — resources, coaching, environment. They don’t leave it to chance.

Second — and this is the harder truth — the right environment for that swimmer probably doesn’t exist in India right now. And I say that not as a criticism but as a reality. To reach the highest level, you need to train alongside swimmers who are faster than you. That’s what pushes you. That competitive environment in practice — that’s where champions are made. I’m sending my own grandson to Toulouse next winter to train with Leon Marchand’s developmental coach. Not because there are no good coaches in the United States — there are — but because I want him in an environment where he’s being pushed every single day by swimmers at the very top of the world.

If India identifies a genuinely exceptional swimmer, the right move might be to support that swimmer to go somewhere — Australia, the US, Europe — where they’re training with the best in the world. Put them in that pool. See if they can keep up. That’s how you bridge the gap. Eventually, you build that environment inside India. But for now, for the swimmers who are ready, it may need to happen elsewhere.

You’ve coached Indian swimmers directly over the years. What are your observations?

As a population, as a culture — extremely intelligent people. Very smart. That can actually be a disadvantage in swimming sometimes. They can outthink themselves, overthink the mechanics, get too much into their heads when they need to be in their bodies.

The most consistent weakness I’ve found — not across the board, but in most — is strength. Not being as physically strong as swimmers from other populations. So I put most of them straight onto more strength training.

On training volume — that’s not the issue. The Indian swimmers I’ve worked with are going far enough in terms of distance. The question is whether the training is appropriately structured, and whether enough attention is being paid to leg work and kicking sets. That’s an area where I see a consistent gap.

But the main thing, always, is environment. My advice to any young Indian swimmer who is serious: if the right environment doesn’t exist where you are, find it somewhere else. Train with people who are faster than you. Try to catch them. Try to stay with them. That discomfort — that gap between where you are and where they are — that’s where improvement lives.

Next: Part 4 — The Swimmer’s Mind: On Coin Flips, Phelps vs Spitz, and What the Sport Gets Wrong About Money

Gary Hall Sr. is Technical Director and CEO of The Race Club, Islamorada, Florida. theraceclub.com

Part 3 of 4 | A Nation of 1.4 Billion, and a Tiny Competitive Pool