Gurugram Swimmer, 20, Crosses English Channel

GURUGRAM: Kamya Bhardwaj, a 20-year-old swimmer from Ashok Vihar, has crossed the English Channel, covering the open-water route from England to France in 14 hours and 19 minutes on September 22. She may be the first woman swimmer from Haryana to complete the crossing.

Bhardwaj, a student of Dyal Singh College, entered the water at Shakespeare Beach in Dover at 5.35am and touched the French coast at Cap Gris Nez at 7.54pm. The swim took her through cold water and strong currents, and the last few hours through a patch of jellyfish.

## The last four hours

By her own account, the final stretch near the French coast was the hardest. She first tried to swim around the jellyfish. In the 13th hour she was told that at her pace she still had around five hours to go, so she stopped trying to dodge them and pushed straight through. She was stung three times, on her left forearm, right ear and face.

She had applied for a Channel slot about a month and a half before the swim, got her confirmation, and flew to England 10 days before the crossing. Conditions at Dover took some getting used to, and she managed about six hours of sleep the night before she set off.

## Training far from the sea

There is no open sea near Gurugram, and Bhardwaj's preparation shows it. She trains at a pool in Palwal once every 15 days, swimming for 12 hours at a stretch. To get her body used to the Channel's cold, she sat in a large bucket filled with ice.

She started swimming in Class 4, initially because she wanted to grow taller. Injuries later forced her out of the pool for a while. She credits her family for getting her back, including her father, who gave up his job to support her training.

The Channel is not her first long swim. She earlier set an Indian national record with a 54 km double-way crossing of the Palk Strait, which took 18 hours and 15 minutes.

## What comes next

Bhardwaj has said she now wants to attempt the Cook Strait in New Zealand and the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, both counted among the toughest open-water swims. She was also due to join Indian para swimmers for a relay across the English Channel on Thursday.

She has described open-water swimming as a mental contest with fear as much as a test of physical endurance, and has called for more government support for the sport. She has also asked for cleaner rivers in India, so that swimmers like her have somewhere closer to home to train.

For a swimmer whose longest sessions happen in a pool in Palwal, the Channel crossing also shows how little open-water training space the region offers. Her next attempts will again mean preparing far from the kind of water she will have to cross.