BENGALURU: Leading up to the Asian Age Group Swimming Championships at Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence, India’s focus was on getting that elusive 2020 Olympics A cut.
The nation put in its best show in the competition (15 gold, 19 silver and 18 bronze), surpassing last edition’s tally (40) by a mile. But, no A cut.
Virdhawal Khade, Srihari Nataraj and Sajan Prakash — India’s leading swimmers — accounted for 10 medals, but none of bettered their personal bests. Only Kushagra Rawat, who also got a B cut for Tokyo in 800m freestyle, bettered his in 200m, 400m and 1500m freestyle events.
India’s only national record came from a non-Olympic event: Divya Satija in 50m women’s butterfly. Srihari, who broke his own national record in all three backstroke events in the Junior World Championships and senior nationals, could only better the meet record in 100m backstroke. The 18-year-old was 0.37s slower than his personal best and 1.21s shy of the A cut (53.85s).
Khade, who swam 22.44s in the 50m freestyle in the nationals earlier this month, could only clock 22.59s, 0.58s slower than the A cut. Srihari won the 200m backstroke gold on Friday with 2:04.25s, but that was more than two seconds slower than his personal best (2:01.70s).
India chief coach Pradeep Kumar was not satisfied with these timings. He felt that the competition in the open category wasn’t good enough to push the swimmers for the A cut, and that they hadn’t fully recovered from the fatigue of the nationals.
“We knew that they weren’t going to qualify (for Olympics) at this meet as the nationals was very close. We didn’t have much time after the nationals. So, our top swimmers were not tempered for this competition. If you look at Sajan and Srihari, they had back-to-back competitions. They could not recover completely.”
With the home advantage gone, the Indian trio now has Singapore Nationals and Malaysia Open (next March-April) to get the A cut. “The target was for all of our swimmers to get personal bests. The focus was never on medals. But since that hasn’t happened, we will be looking at the meets in Doha (World Cup) and Singapore. In those, we expect them to peak and qualify for Olympics.”
However, Kumar was happy with the performance from junior swimmers. For many, it was their first international event. And 25 of them achieved their personal best.
“It was a very good opportunity and exposure for 75 percent of our swimmers. Our swimmers in U-14, U-17 age groups swam great races. There was tough competition in those groups. We got about 25 personal bests from them. That is a great sign of improvement at the age-group level,” he said.