A female athlete coming from the state of Haryana representing India at the Olympics, sounds familiar right? No, she’s not the one you’re thinking, she’s also not her sister that you might think about, as a matter of fact, she doesn’t belong to the wrestling community neither she belongs to the boxing community. I have got all of you really confused now, haven’t I?
Well, she is involved with something that almost 60% of the people all over the world love doing to some extent and the activity is also considered as one of the important life skills. A life skill which people actually prefer to participate in and which is a sport at the Olympics, does that ring a bell? I get the fact that it is not yet familiar as a sport here in India and that we haven’t had the quality infrastructure in the past to help some of the talents we had to reach the top and compete at the highest level, but the good news is things are changing. This is one particular story of a girl who’s a torchbearer for the sport in the younger generation and at the age of 23, she’s inspiring a lot of other young girls back in Haryana to take up competitive swimming.
Oh wait, did I say swimming? Yes, I did and I’m talking about none other than the first Indian women swimmer to participate in the Summer Olympics since 2004 in Athens, Shivani Kataria.
Swimming as a sport or competitive swimming started becoming mainstream during the nineteenth century. Generally, the Olympic sized swimming pool is 50m long and there are as far as 16 recognized events each for male and female athletes including the individual and team events, at the Olympics (it took 5 Summer Olympics for Michael Phelps from 2000 to 2016 to bag 28 medals in total out of which 23 are gold medals).
There’s no lack of talent in India when it comes to swimming, in fact, we have one of the largest numbers of kids participating in the sport till the age of 15-16. What happens is, because of the lack of available infrastructure, and since not everyone can manage the funds to stay abroad and pay for the coaching, traveling, and competition fees, soon a lot of those kids have to drop off and find some different career paths. When Shivani first started, her state did not have a single 50m pool so she used to spend her initial years in Delhi to train and get experience. She knew she had to find a stable environment for her to train and to compete so that she’s able to get better and compete at the highest level one day. Her father sacrificed his job and they shifted to Bangalore where the national academy and top-level coaches lived.
A little peek into Shivani’s childhood and how swimming came into her life
One of Shivani’s sisters used to swim and her brother also swam to an extent and went to state level for Haryana. For Shivani, she first started swimming in a summer camp at Baba Gang Nath Swimming Center in Gurugram, as a 6-year-old, and later as the years went by, she started developing an interest in the sport so her parents put her under better coaches.
“I had a couple of options. I tried tennis for a while and I really loved that too, but I chose swimming” says Shivani.
At the age of 12, she decided to go pro and solely focus on her studies. She soon started participating in district-level events. Her school in Gurugram, DAV Public School, was very supportive from the start and let Shivani skip classes and only attend the exams. Her first moment of recognition arrived during the CBSE Nationals in Gujarat where she won the bronze medal.
Preferred event and further training
Shivani generally competes in the women’s 200m freestyle event. The 2013 Asian Youth Championships gave her the first-ever medal at an international level when she finished sixth in the same. She went to a FINA camp (International Swimming Federation) in 2015 held at Thyanpura in Phuket, Thailand. She trained there for a year and showed glimpses of her talent on a few occasions. It was hard at first, says Shivani as it was the first time in her life, she trained at least three times a day which also involved post swimming workouts. A year later, she was selected to represent India for the 2016 South Asian Games where she won a gold medal in the 200m freestyle event which was also a huge boost for her chances of qualifying for the Rio Olympics later that year.
Road to Rio
Shivani’s maiden Olympic qualification, came when she had just finished a competition in Hong Kong was at the airport. Fellow swimmer Sajan Prakash who was with her received the news via a text that he and Shivani had been selected as India’s wild card entrants for the Rio Olympics.
“It was a childhood dream of me and my father, to represent India at the Olympics. So, to finally see the dream getting fulfilled, I couldn’t sleep the entire flight.”
She further added that her goal is to reach semis and take it from there. “No Indian men or women have managed to reach the semis in the Olympics in any swimming event, so that is what I’ll try to achieve,” said Shivani.
During her time in Thailand, she was able to clock 2:04:00 in the camp which was an impressive feat. During the preliminary heats in the Olympics, she could clock as far as 2:09:30 which put her out of the semifinal race.
Other Successes
Shivani holds most of India’s current national records in the women’s category.
Shivani who lives in Gurugram and is pursuing a BA from Hansraj College recently participated in four categories in the Bhopal Championships in 2019, where she bagged gold in all of those events.
She also participated in an age-group event in Uzbekistan and was able to come up with a silver medal to her name in the 100m freestyle category.
There are no guesses as to who is her idol or the person she looks up to when it comes to swimming (the same one whose stats I mentioned earlier in the blog).
“The best part about Michael Phelps is that he always has his eyes on the prize and does not become complacent even after winning so many medals. That is something I always take inspiration from,” said Shivani.
Eyes on Tokyo
Through her experience in Rio in 2016 did not go the way she would’ve hoped, Shivani is more than ready to learn from her mistakes and achieve something that has never been achieved in this sport by an Indian swimmer.
“If an ordinary girl from Gurugram can do it, I don’t think why anyone else can’t.” says Shivani.