CHENNAI: Five of the country’s elite junior swimmers from the TOP Scheme development group — Kenish Gupta, Bahiya Sachdeva, Suvana Bhaskar, Apexa Fernandes and Aanya Wala — will be joining the ongoing senior national camp at Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence in Bengaluru from Friday.
The camp commenced on January 11 and will end on February 21. The juniors will also be benefitted by the visit of Genadijus Sokolovas, a world-renowned leader in swimming science, between February 2 and February 7 during the camp. The juniors will join the likes of Srihari Nataraj, Kushagra Rawat and so on. Among the seniors, Sajan Prakash will also be flying down to co-incide with the visit of Sokolovas. He is currently training in Dubai.
Meanwhile, Swimming Federation of India (SFI) has signed a long-term partnership with Swimming South Africa (SSA) on Friday to develop swimming and water polo in the two countries. Through this agreement, the Indian swimmers will get to play more competitive events against the Rainbow Nation and also have joint-training camps in South Africa and vice-versa. “We are sure this partnership will help us engage with our South African counterparts to further strengthen swimming and water polo in India,” SFI president RN Jayaprakash was quoted as saying.
This will also see the Indian swimmers get access to South Africa’s state-of-the-art high-performance centres. The SFI had already expressed their interest to go to Cape Town during March-April for an exposure trip with focus on technical assessment, depending on the Covid-19 situation. SFI’s secretary-general Monal Choksi believes that this will only enhance the performance of the Indian athletes. “There will be cross-training with the South Africa national team and we will also be using the high-performance centres.”