AHMEDABAD: Above the sparkling pale-blue swimming pool inside the new sports complex where the Asian Swimming Championships is currently on, two cameras quietly record everything. What is the swimmer's stroke length? How much did they spend underwater? Where were the sections when they lost time?
The unearthed data is fed into computers before they are crunched into snackable bits. This is then handed over to the Indian swimmers as well as the head coach, Nihar Ameen. Welcome to an initiative by the Swimming Federation of India (SFI) to narrow the gap to some of Asia's best swimmers, most of whom already had access to data in their own training centres back home.
For Indian swimmers, getting access to this data usually meant a trip to Europe. It changed in 2022 after Ameen went on a trip to Eindhoven, The Netherlands. There, he met an analyst, Aditya Kariyappa, a swimming researcher. Ameen convinced Kariyappa to set up Swimple, a tech-based, data solutions company in Bengaluru. "It's a game-changer," Ameen says.
"I have always been a seeker for how to streamline what we do, going scientific... tech has always been the answer to validate what I see."
How has swimple changed the lives of India's elite swimmers? "It has helped in fine-tuning training, improvement of velocity, drag reduction, what's holding us back, improving our training cycles and becoming more efficient."
In short, it's more evidence based. Kariyappa offers an example. In Ahmedabad, he provides Ameen with race analysis. Back home in Bengaluru, thanks to a six-camera set-up, all of them placed inside the pool at the Dravid-Padukone Centre of Excellence, he has access to biomechanics. "We found out that Sajan Prakash had a very minor issue in that he was swimming with the little swimmer slightly away from the ring finger. At this level, that could be the race."
Some of the race analysis 'we look at', according to Ameen, are 'stroke length, distance you travel in one stroke cycle, the cadence and so on'. "We record races before breaking it down into 10m splits," Kariyappa adds.
On Monday evening, just before the start of a final, Ameen debriefed with an Indian swimmer while looking at his race analysis from the heat. "You need to keep these things in mind," he says to him. "Your numbers are pretty good otherwise."