At all multi-event Games, the kind seen as the holy grail in Indian sport, athletics and swimming combine for the greatest number of medals. At the Paris Olympics later this week, 48 and 35 medal events will take place in each discipline respectively.
While inroads have recently been made in track and field – not just with javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra going to Paris as defending Olympic champion – India remain historic underachievers in swimming. The Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS), founded and operated by the JSW Group, plan to go about changing that with the launch of a new ‘High Performance Swimming Programme’ at the institute campus in Bellary on earlier this month.
Hopes are of tapping the unearthed mine of medals on offer at the multi-sport events that capture the imagination of Indians every few years.
“If India has to be performing at the Olympics, they need to do well at swimming and track and field. We are very clear of that, and that is why we have selected both,” Parth Jindal, founder of IIS, told The Indian Express on the sidelines of the launch of the programme in partnership with Mizuho Bank.
“Plus it’s you against the clock,” he added. “It’s not just you against someone else. We hope if you can swim a particular time here, you can replicate that in any pool in the world.”
Jindal says success for the swimming programme will be determined if in-house swimmers can make the ‘A’ qualification standard for the 2032 Summer Games, if not by LA 2028. This year, that timing has not been achieved by any Indians, with the two representatives – Srihari Nataraj and Dhinidhi Desinghu – booking their tickets to the French capital through Universality quota places.
The sprawling IIS campus currently houses nearly 200 athletes, many of them up-and-coming juniors, with facilities for training in combat sports and track and field. Swimming will be the latest addition, currently 30 swimmers of different age groups are in the programme.
While the infrastructure and facilities at IIS are developed and modern, the institute, started in 2018, is too young to have proven effectiveness in taking young athletes full of talent and turning them into medal winners. They will have to start from scratch with swimmers. This is a sport that has little history in this country, and is not represented among its rural youth; the likes of wrestling, boxing, and athletics – all practiced at IIS – had those advantages.
Those behind the scenes, however, beam with confidence about delivering. “I’m certain that this will prove to be a watershed moment in Indian sport,” Rusdhee Warley, CEO of IIS and a former swimming administrator in federations in South Africa and New Zealand, said at a press conference.
“We have not taken on swimming to participate, we have taken it on to be competitive. We believe we have the environment here to take a group of young athletes from here to 2032 that will make a name for themselves.”
(This writer was in Bellary on the invitation of IIS Vijayanagar)
