At 20, Maana Patel has seen it all.
Yes, by the time she turned 20 in March this year, India’s best backstroke swimmer has already been through injury and rehab – and the hurt of missing the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta. And now, without being as old as Virdhawal Khade and Sajan Prakash, she has been given the chance to empathise with them both after being dropped from the TOP Scheme ‘watchlist’.
Then again, this is not about Maana Patel. It is about a data-driven system that does not take into account the quagmire that Indian swimming finds itself in. Khushi Dinesh remains on the watchlist for 2024 and is now joined by Aryan Varnekar, CJ Sanjay, Ridhima V Kumar, and Shivangi Sharma as those who will be watched with greater interest by the data-miners than others.
From the fact that it has 2024 Olympic Games and has taken the times in the last three year in World Championships (and Olympic Games) into account, it is clear that the Target Olympic Podium Scheme has focused on the Olympic Games and may have overlooked the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.
By taking only Olympic Games and World Championships performances into account, SAI’s data-crunchers set the bar inordinately high for the swimmers. And ignored the fact that Indian swimmers have won but three Asian Games medals after they won six in the opening edition at home in 1951.
Back in March 2019, TOP Scheme officials announced a ‘watchlist’ comprising seven swimmers – Virdhawal Khade, Sajan Prakash, Neel Roy, Likith SP, Lohit M, Maana Patel and Khushi Dinesh. The US-based Neel Roy is the only one who has moved from ‘watchlist’ to the development group along with a bunch of seven others who have impressed the data-miners.
The six swimmers – Srihari Nataraj, Kushagra Rawat, Advait Page, Aryan Makhija, Aryan Nehra and Kenisha Gupta – who have been part of the TOP development group have been joined by eight more athletes in that list. The new entrants are Mihir Ambre, Shoan Ganguly, Tanish Mathew, Aanya Wala, Apeksha Fernandes, Bhavya Sachdeva and Suvana Bhaskar.
It will be interesting to see how the swimmers in the TOPS development group fare in the next couple of years when it would be time to shortlist the squad for the Asian Games. And it would be just as interesting to see if the other swimmers, assessed but kept out of TOP Scheme by a data-driven mechanism, take this challenge and keep themselves in the fray. Clearly, some of them will fall back on NGOs like Olympic Gold Quest and Corporate-run academies like Glenmark to sustain their interest in the sport and bounce back to represent India in the Asian Games.
Then again, if the Swimming Federation of India contents itself with the increase in the number of its athletes on the TOPS development list from six to 14, it is because of years of inertia in its corridors. Nothing reflects that more than the fact that as many as 70 shooters, 36 boxers and 34 archers are in the TOPS development list.
This article first appeared in Mail Today on Saturday, August 8, 2020
