Out of stormy waters

India’s oldest competitive swimmer is also the country’s top athlete

Days before the Delhi Commonwealth Games, swimmer Richa Mishra hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. She, along with two other swimmers, had tested positive for methylhexaneamine — a banned substance. Though she had cleared the test of the World Anti-doping Agency a month earlier, this put paid to any hope she had to win a medal at the Games.

Last month, she regained some lost ground when she won 16 medals (11 gold medals, 4 silver and a bronze) from the pool at the National Games in Ranchi. With this impressive haul, Mishra was adjudged the overall best athlete in Ranchi — an honour she has won earlier at Guwahati (2007) and Hyderabad (2002). “It (testing positive for methylhexaneamine) was an accident, but life never stops,” she waxes philosophical. Her next target is the London Olympics.

At 27, Mishra is well past the age when swimmers are in their prime. She is in fact the oldest swimmer in competitive swimming. That doesn’t dampen her enthusiasm. “Swimming is an addiction. I take rests but I know I want to get back to it. I still have some years left in me.”

Though she is efficient in all the four strokes of swimming, Mishra is targeting 200-metre and 400-metre individual medleys. The qualification timing, according to FINA, is 2:16.98 minutes and 4:52.59 minutes for the two events. Mishra’s all-time best is 2:23.62 minutes and 5:01.08 minutes. Qualification will not be a cakewalk for her.

Unfortunately, no indoor pool in Delhi is functional at the moment, and training at places like Bangalore can be costly. “By now I should have started training keeping London in mind, but there is no pool available in Delhi,” says Mishra. “For the last three years, we don’t have a proper pool in Delhi since the Talkatora was being prepared for the Commonwealth Games. And for the past few years I have trained without a coach.” Mishra had to shift to Mumbai with her family two months before the National Games, so that she could practise.

What perhaps keeps her going is her passion for swimming. “When I went to the pool for the first time I jumped with my clothes on,” laughs Mishra.

She, however, doesn’t remember when the water journey for her and elder sister Charu, also a national champion, began. But she distinctly remembers her first participation in a national championship back in 1994. Charu was one of the top swimmers in India. “At the Chandigarh national swimming championship, Charu had to give up her event for me. And I still lost it,” she says .

Since then every day for the Mishra family begins at 4 in the morning. Travelling on a scooter with their father, the sisters would get down metres before the entrance of the stadium to avoid embarrassment. It was under Coach MM Sharma that the momentum of serious training was set. At one point the Mishra sisters dominated every splash in the pool. She is now being coached by Chand Tokas who has, amongst other things, got Mishra to lose weight she had put on some time back.

At 15 years of age she joined CRPF as sub-inspector to share the financial burden with her father. After spending more than 18 years of her life in a single-bedroom house where she would never invite her friends, Mishra, along with her family, has now moved to a three-storey house. “We used to avoid inviting people to our house,” she says. It was with the prize money of Rs 30 lakh from Andhra Pradesh government for representing it at the 2002 National Games that changed the fortune for the family.

But what’s the road ahead? “When you know there’s not much hope one should work hard and leave some things to destiny,” says Mishra.