Who is Junior Swimming World Championships finalist Apeksha Fernandes?

The 17-year-old became the first Indian female swimmer to enter the World Championships finals.

IIT Bombay, regarded as one of India's premier institutes, is quite selective. Only the best is what the institute wishes to engage itself with. Be it the students wishing to seek admission or the content the institute puts out through social media. 

So, it’s quite strange to see a tweet on swimming pop out from the IIT Bombay’s official handle which is usually flooded with a sea of posts about science and technology. Exceptions are made in exceptional situations. And if one probe further, one realizes that Apeksha Fernandes, daughter of Prof. BG Fernandes, has been nothing short of exceptional in recent times.

First Indian female to enter World Championships finals

Apeksha Fernandes finished at the eighth position in the World Junior Swimming Championships. Just to put this achievement in context, she became the first-ever female swimmer from India to make it into the tournament finals. In July, the 5-star swimmer was on a record-breaking spree as she bettered five national records in as many days.

She hails from Maharashtra. Her father belongs to a more conventional profession i.e. teaching as an IIT-B professor. Her brother is a former under-10 tennis champion, perhaps the first member from the Fernandes clan to lead their foray into sports.

Coach Dr. Mohan Reddy is another catalyst who fast tracked the 17-year-old Apeksha’s progress. At the tender age of just 10, the child prodigy won her first Nationals medal after winning silver in the 50m breaststroke event in 2015. 

Two years later, she competed in the 46th Junior National Aquatic Championship, where she took first place in all five of the races and earned seven gold medals. In the process, she also set three records during this competition. Even in 2019, she won two gold medals in the sub-junior and junior national aquatic championships in the 200m butterfly and the 50m breaststroke.

A testimony to her insatiable hunger, she is improving with each race that she is competing in. At the World Juniors, she finished eighth in the final of the 200m women's butterfly event but not before rewriting her own 'Best Indian Time' of 2:18.18 in the heats. 

Future for Apeksha

In times to come, Apeksha Fernandes will definitely be India’s flag bearer in the sport of swimming. She will shoulder the responsibility of bringing laurels to the nation with Manna Patel who became India’s first female swimmer to qualify for the Olympics last year. Both compete in different sets of events but what they might be competing together is in breaking the stereotype image of an Indian female athlete. 

The Indian sports scene, especially for the women perspective is blooming at the moment. Apart from Apeksha, there’s wrestler Antim Panghal and judoka Linthoi Chanambam also rewriting history books. What holds Apeksha, like her contemporaries, in good stead is her humble background. Given that she is the daughter of a professor, she will always value the importance of preparation and patience. Performance is bound to follow, then!

Her meteoric rise has only increased the weight of expectations on her. Her name ‘Apeksha’ translates to ‘expectation’ too. Hope, she continues to fulfil the expectations in the same manner that she has been doing of late!