Six rowing champs part of 10-member India team

Calcutta:

Six girls from Calcutta will be part of the 10-member Indian women’s team for the World University Rowing Championship to be held in Shanghai from August 10 to 13.

Some 500 participants from 25 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany and Australia, will compete at the Shanghai Water Sports Centre in Qingpu district.

The finalists were selected at a trial camp in Chandigarh on June 18.

The top rowers from Indian universities attended the camp. The Calcutta contingent comprised four girls from Jadavpur University and two from Calcutta University.

Team JU

Semanti Choudhury, Shramana Saha and sisters Shreyaa and Shweta Brahmachari had won gold in the 2000m women’s fours in the national university championships at Chandigarh earlier this month.

The win was special because the team edged out Punjab University, the hot favourites, by 1.5 seconds.

“It is going to be a huge challenge in China,” Semanti, who has just completed her MSc in economics at Jadavpur University, said.

The senior-most in the group, she’s been rowing for more than a decade. Painting is her other passion.

Shreyaa, the older of the Brahmachari sisters, is doing her MSc in Chemistry from JU. “For me, it is labs and lakes,” Shreyaa, who lives in Southern Avenue, said. She got introduced to the lakes while taking swimming lessons at Anderson Club.

She shifted to rowing in 2009 at the Lake Club. Early morning trainings made her leave the bed at 5am. The two sisters slept together and it was their mother who prodded the younger daughter, Shweta, to follow suit.

“You, too, should get up early. Why don’t you join her for rowing,” Shweta remembered her mother telling her.

Shreyaa won her first medal (bronze) in 2010, the first time she took part in the sub-junior nationals in Roorkee. Shweta started rowing in the winter of 2010 and within six months, won gold in the sub-junior nationals in Calcutta.

Shramana, a first-year English honours student at JU, loves playing the double bass guitar. “I hardly have a social life. For me, the strings and the oars complement each other,” she said.

Team CU

Aishwarya Krishnan and Shreya Iyer, childhood buddies turned rowing partners, together won Bengal’s lone gold medal in the Senior National Championships in Pune last December.

The duo defeated Chandigarh and Odisha in the 500m women’s double sculls.

Shreya has just completed her graduation in psychology from Loreto College. Aishwarya studies commerce in St Xavier’s College. Both started rowing when they were in school, one after the other. The turning point in their careers came in 2015 when they became partners in double sculls. The two have since won several medals.

“We are super excited. Our strength is our chemistry,” Shreya said.

Rowing apart, Aishwarya is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer. Shreya’s other passion is violin.

The training

Shweta and Shramana are members of the Bengal Rowing Club. The rest are Lake Club members.

All six will leave for the training camp in Chandigarh in a few days.

But they are already into full throttle practice mode at the Rabindra Sarobar lake.

Shreya and Aishwarya are focusing on double sculls while the four from Jadavpur are training for women’s fours.

They are training in two shifts at the moment – early morning and evening.

Apart from boat sessions, long-distance running, ergometers and gymmimg are part of their schedule.

All four are on a junk-free and high-protein diet.

“We have not competed with so many formidable teams on an international level earlier. But we will give everything we have got,” Aishwarya said.