In a little more than a year, National Programme Director Chris Martin, a seasoned swim coach who has worked in leading nations such as the USA, Great Britain and China, has identified what prevents Indian swimmers from reaching the elite level. He has also started working on a long-term vision.

In order to assess the situation, Martin first conducted three-day workshops in different States, including Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Kerala and Karnataka.

“The honest opinion is that he believes our Indian coaching system [to be] caught [up] in the 80s,” said Swimming Federation of India (SFI) secretary Monal Chokshi. Consequently, Martin has conducted some courses ‘which are finding acceptance among younger coaches’.

The SFI is also carrying out a National Talent Pool (NTP) programme, looking to make a mark by 2030. Recently, it sent 30 swimmers in their late teens for a high altitude camp in Armenia and expects positive results in the coming months.

During the National aquatics championships in Bhubaneswar in the last week of June, Martin spoke to The Hindu about the overall health of Indian swimming. Excerpts:

What have you seen in one year?

I was brought here to do a two-tier project — to do coach education and open a development pathway and try to get the kids on long-term athlete development. In a year, I’ve seen us get started in both, but I’ve also seen the tremendous amount that has to be done for that to succeed.

Can you highlight the areas of improvement?

We have to take a long-term athlete development approach. That involves a certain amount of training in a certain amount of years and to not be completely obsessed with medals along the way. If I open your newspaper, they’ll say so-and-so won five medals…They’ll never tell me the age…[and] the time. To get to the world standard, those are the two most important things. I feel we’ve made some efforts in both, really educating the kids on how they grow up and how training is presented to them and…think about what they can do down the line rather than what they can just get right now.

You’re working with different coaches and systems all over the country.

I also work for World Aquatics in coach education. I kind of brought one of the systems that we’ve done there to here. We’ve got an online introduction and then we have Level 1 and 2 courses. We’ve already put 100 coaches through Level 1 and another 80 in the wait-list from the online version. We’ve had 40 go through Level 2. The coaches’ education, the expansion of knowledge is ongoing.

Looking at the advanced countries, what is the best model for India to follow?

The people that get to the top of the Olympic Games take an LTAV [Long Term Asset Value] approach — they’re building people like you grow a tree. No one’s measuring a tree by how many inches it grows in each year because it’s organic. And, human beings are organic…One of the problems here is that there’s a whole lot of swimming for money. Learn to swim, it’s all cash business. People want to rush to have a five-year-old swim too long, or a six-year-old do backstroke…and this gets you set off on the wrong way. It has to match the growth rates of the kids.

Is it like what they say in athletics, ‘Don’t specialise so early’?

True, you don’t want to do that. We’ve made some moves…in trying to take the 50-metre events out of the kids too young so that they can at least get some aerobic development. We’ve tried to separate the sub-juniors from the juniors because we have 11-year-olds saying, ‘I’m the champion of India’. If you do that, what’s the incentive for them to be the real champion of India, or even the champion of the world?

Does the system, or the swimmers or the coaches, need to unlearn something?

That’s a tough question…what all of them need to do is to stop focusing on age group success. Most of the people that are in the Olympic finals, they are people that made the final push in their late teens, early twenties, and no one told them they were great when they were 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. That needs to be unlearned.

Should there not be any expectations from the age group

?Yeah, where I come from [USA], people put their kids in swimming to have fun, to have an activity, to learn and grow, and to get the lessons from swimming that go into regular life. I do run into parents who put their kids in swimming and say, ‘Okay, if I don’t get a medal by this year or two years, I’m getting you out, and there’s a better use of time and money.’ Which is obviously right, but we’re not going to climb the world scale with that attitude.

Haste makes waste: The development of young swimmers must not be rushed, says Martin, because it ‘sets you off on the wrong way’. It must match their growth rates.
| Photo Credit:
Biswaranjan Rout

What kind of natural talent have you seen here?

I’ll give you this example, and it combines your question about natural talent and what needs to be unlearned. This Odisha project with JSW, which is a fantastic thing, they’ve reams and reams of little kids that they’re starting to teach and engage…I looked at the smallest kids [who] were swimming backstroke in a very, very good position. I went to the juniors, only 50% of them were doing that. I went to the seniors, only less than a handful. The reason? I feel when those seniors were small kids, their parents paid for them to be able to learn ‘backstroke’ at a ridiculously early age and the proprioceptive model of how children move was not consulted.

What’s the most heartening thing you’ve seen?

The response to the NTP has been very heartening. I make the kids write a logbook in the couple of weeks they spend with me, and what they write is absolutely fascinating.

What’s the craziest thing?

The same thing. When I had 30 kids write a logbook, and they were ready to go home, I said, ‘Here’s your logbooks’. They said, ‘No coach…If you give them to us, our parents and coaches, mainly our parents, will want to read what’s inside.’ I thought that was crazy.

Is it important to integrate all sorts of swimming clinics, coaching clubs?

It’s pretty much impossible, and what we can do is try to get a base level of education…that’s what I’ve done with that. In terms of integration, sports seems to be a business here. People are selling certificates, credentials, programmes, support networks and all this, selling supplements, selling everything. It’s impossible to integrate that when so many people are trying to make economic gains…Basically short-term gains. I find the people running the SFI are progressive…everything that has been told to me has been very reasonable. I do find there’s a big road to hope. It’s a large mountain.