The Sports-India Community

Saw that there is no swimming thread in this forum.. So here we go

Wanted to know the current status of Indian Swimming? Swimmers who are making waves in the domestic circuit?  Are we making any progress at all in this sport?

I know David used to talk about someone in Triathlon with lot of promise (forgot the name though)..

Triathlon requires outstanding swimming skills but these athletes are more of endurance swimmers rather than skilled for speed. The full fledged triathlon events consist of a 2 1/2 to 3 mile long swim in an ocean, riding a bike for about 120 miles and then running a full marathon ( about 26 miles). The longest swimming event in the Olympics is 1,500 meters.

The Swimming Federation of India has been under the leadership of Virendra Nanavati for many years. I do not know how well he runs his ship although people like mugu and David can give us the real story. Indian swimmers have not excelled in the international scene and I believe that Khazan Singh’s silver medal at the 1986 Asian Games is the only highlight.

In swimming it is the training techniques and methods employed in India that are at fault. This is one sport where a lot of money is not required and esp. in Delhi (Mehrauli used to produce a bunch of them) a lot of the poorer people also swam. A whole lot of them them get jobs with the CRPF and other such organisations.

I can say training and technique since whenever someone went to Australia to train and come back the particular swimmer was miles ahead of the lot. Now ofcourse sending the best swimmers to Australia (which is what is typically done though not always) is not really the best solution. They could be more talented swimmers who have such poor technique that they are not the fastest yet they do reasonably well despite that due to some physical advantages that they might have.

A backstroker comes to mind who was very promising in the mid 90's but I don't know what happened to him. He finished in the medals in the Australasian Junior Championships. I will probably think of the name eventually but maybe somebody remembers the name before I do.

Rehan Poncha is/was also doing a good job but like I said the training methods suck because if the Aussies can knock off 5-10seconds off someones PB why can't we have coaches who can get trained by the Aussies to try and duplicate that in India on a wider scale.

A relevant article that I found http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story ... t_id=25659

Dhruv wrote:A backstroker comes to mind who was very promising in the mid 90's but I don't know what happened to him. He finished in the medals in the Australasian Junior Championships. I will probably think of the name eventually but maybe somebody remembers the name before I do.

Dhruv, you are probably referring to Ranajoy Punja, who had a stint in the US those days. Unless you are thinking of Wilson Cherian (Shiny Abraham's husband) who was with Eric Arnold in Australia for a while. However, both were from mid-80s to late-80s. Thus, I can't put my finger on your man for sure.

Nope. It was Bhanu Sachdeva that I was thinking of and I guess it was the early 90's. He seemed to dissappear off the face of competitive swimming for a while but still managed to get an Arjuna Award(controversially). A lot his records stood for about 8-10 years are have recently been broken by Rehan etc. He should only be in his late 20's early 30's right now if my recollection is fine, but somehow didn't make it beyond the initial promise he showed early in his career after his sessions in Australia. (IIRC)

After looking at his times he seemed to regressing as time went on which is surprising because IIRC he was fairly young in the early 90's but maybe I am wrong. I was quite young then as well so maybe my perceptions were incorrect. These are his 200m backstroke timings where he won gold at various SAF games

1991 SAF Gold time: 2min 12 sec.
1993 SAF Gold time: 2min 14 sec.
1995 SAF Gold time: 2min 17 sec.

Some forum members may not be aware that Dhruv used to swim competitively in his "younger" days.

One of the problems stated in the news article mentioned by Dhruv is the lack of heated swimming pools in India. Dhruv, mugu, etc., how many heated swimming pools are in existence in India now?

I agree with Dhruv about the lack of proper coaching in swimming in India. My children swam competitively for YMCA and TACT when they were 10 and 8 years of age. The coaches were focussing on starts, angle of entry into the water, hand and feet positioning on entry, proper flip turns, etc at that young age. Warm up was swimming 64 laps of the 25 meter pool for these young children.

Oh my god, are we talking about swimming. I don't know much about swimming other than Richa mishra, Nisha Millet. Probably good chance to improve my knowledge beyond the sports I already know.

rehan poncha is the lone hope right now. the other indian swimmers are nowhere even close of world standards. i looked at average national men's indian race timings and they are comparable to some of the top 16 year old timings in the US.


i think michael phelps would be able to swim a 200 free go eat breakfast and come back before any indian swimmer finished his race.

BSharma wrote:Some forum members may not be aware that Dhruv used to swim competitively in his "younger" days.

Well I wouldn't call it competitively, I was probably did better in other sports

Dhruv, if you don't mind can you enlighten us with the other sports you played?

I do mind and I thought this was Offtopic BSharma.

Awesome, thanks Kumar for starting this thread. It is a sport that I love so much!! I was just thinking a few days ago that there isn't a swimming thread! I don't really know the Indian scene very well but I do remember Khazan Singh winning the silver medal at one of the Asian games. Shikha Tandon is supposed to be pretty good and even qualified for the Athens games. On the men's side, Arun Venkatraman shows promise - however the standard in India is still very bad compared to the Australians, China or America - probably from the lack of good infrastructure/coaches.

OK, Dhruv I am starting a thread named SPORTS PLAYED BY DHRUV, so that you can post there.

You won't have much luck there either .

I do mind and I thought this was Offtopic BSharma.

Dhruv,
My intention was to let the forum members know that your comments came from your experience as a swimmer, and perhaps carry more weight than mine (oly a recreational swimmer).

I apologize if it hurt your feelings.