The Swimming Federation of India appears to have relieved the long-serving Pradeep Kumar of his duties as National Coach. The 2016 Dronacharya Award winning coach has been at the helm of affairs of the Indian Swim team since 2005, continuing in the position even after moving base to Dubai in 2016.
Pradeep Kumar will travel as Sajan Prakash’s high performance coach to the Uzbekistan Open Summer Swimming Championships, scheduled to be held in Tashkent from April 12 to 17. Pradeep will also coach junior swimmers Tanish George Mathew and Shoan Ganguly as well. Interestingly, another Dronacharya, Nihar Ameen will travel as the high performance coach of Srihari Nataraj.
While the SFI seemingly backs Sajan Prakash and Srihari Nataraj to crack the Tokyo Olympics qualifying time (A Standard, as it is popularly known) and may have left them to focus their energies on their respective wards, it has left the task of managing the other swimmers to Asian Games bronze medallist Sandeep Sejwal.
Sajan Prakash achieved his Olympic selection time (B standard) of 1:58.03 in the 200m butterfly event in the Malaysian Championships on April 28, 2019. He clocked 1:59.31 in the Latvian Open on February 28 and will be gunning for 1:56.48 to ensure automatic entry into the Tokyo Games starting on July 23.
Srihari Nataraj, who secured a B Standard time of 54.69 seconds in the FINA World Junior Championships in Budapest on August 20, 2018, needs to clock 53.85 seconds to get a ticket to the Olympis. Having switched coaches in November 2020 after a stint with Pradeep Kumar and AC Jayaraj, he had a time of 55.37 to show in the Karnataka State Championship last month.
The team:
Men: Srihari Nataraj, Sajan Prakash, D Adhithya, SP Likhit, S Danush, AS Anand, Tanish George Mathew and Shoan Ganguly.
Women: Maana Patel, Divya Satija, Shivani Kataria, Chahat Arora, Kenisha Gupta and Suvana C Baskar.
Team Coach: Sandeep Sejwal; High Performance Coaches: Nihar Ameen and Pradeep Kumar.