Sajan Prakash: Swimming Against the Current, Building India’s Future One Length at a Time

Sajan Prakash has reached a phase of his career where every conversation about training, systems and the future of Indian swimming carries the weight of lived experience.

When he speaks, it is not only as a two-time Olympian or a former Asian championships medallist, but as someone who has navigated Indian swimming’s structural gaps first-hand and continues to push forward despite them.

Now training at the Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS) in Vijayanagar, Sajan finds himself in what he describes as one of the most stable and productive environments of his career. Since joining the IIS program in January 2025, the focus has been refreshingly simple: eat well, sleep well, train hard, recover properly, and repeat. For a swimmer who has spent much of his career juggling fragmented support systems, the difference is profound.

At IIS, Sajan feels the infrastructure finally matches the ambition of a high-performance athlete. From nutrition and recovery protocols to structured training plans, the system allows him to concentrate solely on swimming something that elite athletes across the world take for granted, but Indian swimmers rarely do. This stable base has also allowed him to plan ahead with clarity, with the Dubai Open next on his calendar, followed by carefully structured altitude and taper phases.

Yet, even as Sajan benefits from a rare pocket of excellence, he remains acutely aware that his experience is still the exception, not the norm, in Indian swimming.

The Broken Bridge Between Junior and Senior Swimming

One of the most candid parts of Sajan’s reflections revolves around what he sees as Indian swimming’s biggest failure point: the junior-to-senior transition. India produces talented age-group swimmers almost every year, but very few survive the jump to senior international relevance.

According to Sajan, the problem is not talent it is structure. Too many young swimmers are pushed towards early success, early medals and early national recognition, without the underlying physical, mental and technical foundations required for longevity. In recent years, the federation has made efforts to address this, including restructuring junior categories and discouraging excessive early specialisation. But Sajan believes deeper cultural change is still required.

Historically, he notes, Indian swimmers who succeeded did so despite the system, not because of it. Some had strong parental backing, others were driven by sheer passion or survival instincts. In Sajan’s own case, his mother’s background as an athlete played a crucial role in keeping him grounded and disciplined. That kind of support, however, cannot be the default expectation.

What Indian swimming needs, in Sajan’s view, is a clearly defined developmental curriculum one that explains what a swimmer should be learning, physically and mentally, at every age. Without that, setting ambitious goals like Olympic medals for 10- or 12-year-olds becomes not only unrealistic, but harmful. Sport, he insists, should first benefit the child by building discipline, resilience, health and confidence. Medals should be a byproduct, not the sole objective.

The Missing Pillars: Sports Science, Planning and Money

When comparing Indian swimmers to their international counterparts, Sajan is blunt about where the gap lies. It is not about desire or work ethic, but about environment and planning.

Swimming is a sport that demands precise workload management. Without proper periodisation, injury becomes inevitable something Sajan himself learned the hard way. Early in his career, the absence of sports science support meant he often trained through pain, accumulating injuries that could have been avoided with better monitoring.

Even today, he believes that too many swimmers are pushed into mentally and physically exhausting volumes at a young age seven kilometres a day, ten sessions a week without understanding long-term consequences. For teenagers, this often leads to burnout before they even reach senior competition.

Financial fragility compounds the problem. Unlike many Olympic sports, swimming requires year-round access to facilities, coaching, nutrition and frequent competition. For most Indian swimmers, this is simply unaffordable. Sajan acknowledges the support he receives from the Kerala Police department, but points out that such backing rarely stretches far enough to cover extended foreign training stints or high-quality nutrition.

Learning, Not Grinding: Rethinking Youth Development

Sajan is particularly passionate about how young swimmers should be introduced to competition. While he strongly supports early international exposure to understand race pressure and global standards he cautions against equating exposure with excessive training loads.

Children, he mentions, need to learn how to race, how to feel adrenaline, how to lose and bounce back. That education cannot happen if the sport becomes a relentless grind before their bodies and minds are ready. He acknowledges that institutions like IIS have created pathways for overseas exposure, but also recognises the logistical challenges faced by federations and club coaches, who often manage dozens of swimmers and cannot travel abroad for just one or two athletes.

This, again, reinforces his belief that Indian swimming cannot depend on isolated excellence. It needs a collective system that supports coaches, athletes and administrators together.

“Swim with Sajan”: Giving Back While Moving Forward

During a six-to-seven-month rehabilitation break following his Paris 2024 Olympic qualification campaign, Sajan found himself reflecting on how little practical guidance young swimmers receive beyond training plans. That period gave birth to “Swim with Sajan” an initiative aimed at mentoring young athletes through clinics, conversations and shared experiences.

The focus is not just technique, but life skills: handling pressure, managing expectations, understanding recovery and respecting long-term development. The initiative also served a personal purpose, with funds raised helping Sajan finance a high-altitude camp in Andorra a reminder of how even India’s best swimmers often have to self-fund critical parts of their preparation.

Despite frequent questions about retirement or coaching, Sajan remains firmly in pursuit mode. His immediate competitive goal is clear: a 1:55 swim, a time he believes is medal-worthy at the Asian Games. Reaching that mark requires experimentation, patience and belief qualities he has built over a long, injury-affected career.

His upcoming calendar reflects that intent: the Dubai Open as a training meet, an altitude block in Bhutan, a departmental meet in Hyderabad, and a final taper in Singapore, where he hopes to unlock his best performance.

Faith in the Next Generation

Asked which young swimmers excite him most, Sajan’s answer is expansive, not selective. From Rohit Benedicton in butterfly to Rishab Das, Akash Mani in backstroke, Likhit and Dhanush in breaststroke, and Joshua in freestyle, he sees genuine promise across strokes. He is equally optimistic about emerging female swimmers like Dhinidhi and Bhavya.

But talent alone, he reiterates, will not be enough. Indian swimming must elevate its “mind game” learning how to handle expectations, setbacks and international pressure if it wants to convert promise into podiums.

For Sajan Prakash, the journey is no longer just about medals. It is about proving that Indian swimmers can thrive when given structure, science and belief. As he continues to chase his own peak, he is also quietly laying markers for what Indian swimming could become if it finally learns to swim as a system, not a struggle.