“My first memory of swimming is being thrown into the deep end of the Shenoy Nagar swimming pool, and scratching my trainer to get out,” says swimmer Nisha Millet. In Chennai, to launch a Speedo outlet at VR Mall, Anna Nagar, Nisha, the only woman in the 2000 Sydney Olympics swim team for India, interacted with students on the importance of starting swimming young.
At her eponymous swimming academy in Bengaluru, she trains children as young as four years old. Her oldest student is an 84-year-old man. Her own twins, now five years old, started learning when they were five months old. “I get kids who come in at the age of 10 or 11, and they don’t even like water on their faces. If kids are put into water at an early age, they start thinking of it as a natural environment to be in,” she says. Her most popular classes are in fact, the parent-toddler ones, in which parents and their children splash around in the water, singing nursery rhymes and blowing bubbles.
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Her own first laps were in the Shenoy Nagar pool, where she swam with her father. After her first “almost-drowning” incident in Hyderabad as a toddler, it was her father who made her love water again. He even got a transfer to Bengaluru to support her love for swimming. “If anyone in India is serious about swimming, they must come to Bengaluru. The country’s top coaches as well as swimming pools are here,” she says. The schools there are supportive and sports-oriented, she says.
Comparatively, she feels, there isn’t enough competition in Chennai. “In Bengaluru, there are so many non-medallist meets, in which whoever has not won anything at the State-level can participate. These encourage healthy competition among children, so when they go to the National levels, they are well prepared,” she says.
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“From India there are so many good swimmers such as Sajan Prakash and Virdhawal Khade competing at the international level. There’s just not enough awareness about them among the public,” says Nisha, adding that the quality of swimming, especially among male competitive swimmers, has increased dramatically since her time.
“Every sport is developing, including swimming… though perhaps slower than the rest,” she says. And the key to that is the identification of swimming as a life skill.
“I train pregnant women, people with arthritis, and those who have recovered from open-heart surgeries…They now see the importance of swimming for a healthy lifestyle,” says Nisha, who herself swam until the third trimester of her pregnancy. “All across India, people are also practising hydrotherapy for pain relief and recovery,” she says.
“Meanwhile, if you look at the competitive side, brands like Speedo are helping swimmers financially, providing them with hi-tech costumes. We didn’t have any of this, my father must have invested ₹50 lakh in my sister’s and my training,” she says.
With the boom in sports as a career, sportspeople, despite having to retire early, have many options to choose from: sports marketing, management, coaching, or like Nisha, running their own academy. “When I retired, people advised me to take up a government job. But I’m so happy that I did this instead. My friends say I’m the same: still wearing a swimming costume to work, and still smelling of chlorine!”